At the risk of stating the semi-obvious, George W. Bush’s decision to go on national television tomorrow night and announce a plan to deploy 20,000 more U.S. troops in a long-term operation to “secure” Baghdad and some Sunni territory as well, is as mystifying as anything “the decider” has done in the course of his mystifying presidency.Hardly anyone thinks this deployment will work, even within the Pentagon and the White House, as the vast number of blind quotes in the news media questioning the decision makes clear. (Fred Kaplan’s exhaustive review of the operational implausibility of the Bush plan is definitely worth reading). It’s also clear the Maliki government, on whose willingness to fully commit Iraqi forces the slim chances of the whole enterprise rest, is being dragged kicking and screaming into line with Washington’s edict. And that’s hardly a surprise, since “clearing” Baghdad of “terrorists” or “extremists” or whatever Bush chooses to call them, will inevitably involve armed clashes with the Mahdi Army, one of the pillars of Maliki’s political base.Even fans of the idea of deploying more troops typically think the troop levels Bush is talking about will be insufficient to make a difference, other than convincing Iraqis that we’ll never, ever leave. And then there’s the little matter of Bush’s willingness to give American public opinion a big middle finger; as new polls indicate, despite relatively strong (if probably temporary) Repubublican rank-and-file support for the escalation, it’s anathema to the coalition of Democrats and independents that flipped Congress in November.The big symbolic factor in Bush’s decision is supposedly this: he’s finally abandoned the old stay-the-course rap, even if he doesn’t acknowledge the shift tomorrow night. But the strange timing of the escalation strategy helps illustrate something about the administration’s post-invasion Iraq policies that has often been obscured by the consistent happy-talk: they’ve repeatedly flip-flopped, but almost always far too late.Think about it. Rumsfeld took us into Iraq absolutely determined not to conduct an occupation, assuming instead that he could turn over the country to Iraqi exile politicians. That determination barely outlasted the invasion itself. When chaos broke out, administration talking heads first welcomed the phenomenon as the natural exuberance of a liberated people, and savaged anyone who suggested an organized insurgency. When that claim became increasingly absurd, the Bushies described the insurgency as a temporary rear-guard action by Baathists with no real popular base. Then they shifted to a description of the newly-recognized insurgency as composed primarily of “foreign fighters” recruited by al-Qaeda (which, BTW, was thereby “pinned down” in the “flypaper” of Iraq, and couldn’t conduct terrorism operations anywhere else, until they did). When the indigenous Sunni insurgency was finally acknowleged, the administration suggested its increasing ferocity was a sign of desparation. For many months, the president’s men dismissed intra-Pentagon arguments for adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy. And they finally started talking about “clear, hold and build” strategies–and have now placed their chief advocate, Gen. David Petraus, in charge of the “new direction” in Iraq–when the conditions necessary for successful counter-insurgency have all but vanished.What has united all these horribly belated “decisions,” of course, has been the administration’s remarkably consistent resistance to empirical evidence of failure and folly. And by that standard, there’s nothing about the “new direction” that really breaks new ground.

Props to Markos and the New York Times’ Carl Hulsey for noting something in the just-enacted Democratic House rules package that I missed: the retention of Newt Gingrich’s one good idea–term limits on committee chairmen.Neither of them get into the grittiest problem with this idea: the understandable reluctance of African-American chairs to give up their newfound power in the same seniority system that was used for so very long to obstruct and delay civil rights, and to marginalize and even humiliate minority Members.And by explaining the term limits issue strictly in terms of Caucus and leadership discipline, Markos and Hulsey also miss another well-identified problem with Perpetual Chairmanships: the tendency of Perpetual Chairmen to get trapped in the Iron Triangle uniting the executive-branch programs they supposedly oversee, the special-interest and advocacy groups that exist to defend and/or expand those programs (most of whom are avid campaign contributors), and their own professional committee staffs, who are typically cycling through the other sides of the triangle.According to Hulsey, Speaker Pelosi has privately indicated that the term-limits decision could be reversed later on. Let’s hope that’s not the case. There are other ways to ensure that minority voices in the House Caucus are heard; for one thing, “term-limited” committee and subcommittee chairs can be moved to equally influential perches. In any event, it will certainly be hard for this Democratic Congress to pose as a vehicle for “reform” if it backtracks on one of the most ancient and well-abused privileges of the Old Order.

It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the newly Democratic House finally passed lobbying reform (and less noticed but equally important, budget reform) legislation in its first moment in power.:But as today’s DLC New Dem Dispatch noted, lobbying reform won’t mean much if Congress doesn’t go on to deal with the real source of special-interest abuse in Washington–our crazy system of financing elections:

The much-anticipated new restrictions on lobbyist relationships with members, which were enacted late yesterday with only one dissenting vote, are fine so far as they go, though a willingness to strictly enforce bans on the worst abuses (e.g., “revolving door” arrangements that tempt members to lobby the lobbyists for future jobs) will be critical. Moreover, since most of the banned activities will be permitted if conducted as part of campaign fundraisers, we think it’s important that House Democrats signal a renewed interest in cutting the link between campaign contributions and legislation, preferably by jump-starting progress toward serious campaign finance reform, including public financing of congressional elections. A good place to start might be a fresh look at the voluntary public financing plan proposed by Al Gore in 2000, which is one of the few proposals certain to pass constitutional muster.

Aside from those on both the demand and supply sides of campaign contribution checks who prefer the current system, the main sources of indifference to the kind of public financing in place in virtually every other democratic nation are twofold: the immovable object of the Supreme Court’s infinitely regrettable doctrine that political contributions are hyper-constitutionally-protected “free speech,” and the movable but daunting obstacle of public opposition to the use of taxpayer funds for political campaigns. There are many possible if unsatisfying paths around the Supreme Court’s roadblock, as illustrated by the various state systems of voluntary but politically coercive public financing schemes. And at the federal level, as the New Dem Dispatch suggests, Al Gore’s long-forgotten but promising proposal for a public financing fund for congressional campaigns, developed by then-Gore-advisor and now Progressive Policy Institute scholar Paul Weinstein, is worth another look. The key thing for progressives is not to give up, for even a moment, on public campaign financing as a goal. It may take a while to get there, but leadership requires, well, leadership, and succumbing to the current crazy and corruption-feeding system is not acceptable. This is something on which progressives who disagree on many other topics ought to be able to unite.

Last night, over at New Republic‘s The Plank, Michael Crowley marveled at the appearance of Rep. Barney Frank in the chair of the U.S. House of Representatives (sitting in for newly-elected Speaker Nancy Pelosi), describing the visual impact on him as one of “cognitive dissonance,” and a reminder of how much things changed on November 7.This immediately reminded me of a much earlier appearance in the chair by Frank, in the early 1980s, during one of those interminable end-of-year round-the-clock sessions when junior Members were often dragooned into presiding in the wee hours. During a tedious speech by Republican Rep. Marjorie Holt on school prayer, Holt referred to America as “a Christian nation.” Frank interrupted her to observe: “If this is a Christian nation, why does some poor Jew have to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?” Interestingly enough, when I Googled the quote to find a source, what popped up first was a reference to the hilarious incident in a 1984 piece by none other than Charles Krauthammer, appearing in–you guessed it–The New Republic–a piece reposted on the TNR site about two weeks ago. The more things change….

It has been much unremarked given the holidays and the Gerald Ford reminiscences, but on New Year’s Eve, Seymour Martin Lipset, the great American political sociologist, died after a debilitating illness following a stroke in 2001.Marty Lipset was part of an amazing generation of New York Jewish intellectuals of the mid-to-late twentieth century that was educated at City College, went through immersion in socialist theoretical combat, and emerged to make all sorts of contributions, some Left, some Right, to the political life of the United States. Lipset’s most important contribution was his analysis of “American exceptionalism,” and especially his elucidation of the cultural and social factors that prevented the American working class from the commitment to socialism that characterized their counterparts in Europe. Lipset is also well-known in Canada for his long-standing and serious efforts to examine differences between U.S. and Canadian culture and politics.On a more personal level, I would note Lipset’s involvement late in his career with the Progressive Policy Institute, and his work on the emergence of post-socialist progressive politics in the 1980s and 1990s. During my own long association with the DLC/PPI, I have had the opportunity to meet two “living legends” (politicians aside). One was Betty Friedan, at a lunch with Will Marshall to discuss a New Democrat magazine article that Friedan was writing. And the other was Marty Lipset.

Jonathan Cohn has a fascinating article up on the New Republic site touting Denmark as a country that has managed to post world-class economic growth and employment figures despite maintaining (with some important reforms) a generous social safety net. The whole article’s worth reading and pondering, but there’s one detail in Cohn’s account of the Danish experience that especially caught my attention:

Denmark spends more than 4 percent of its GDP on its labor market programs–the most of any country in the n Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) and more than 20 times what the United States spends on its worker-training programs

.There’s been a long-raging debate in U.S. progressive circles over the proper role, if any, of worker retraining initiatives in coping with job loss and other economic dislocations associated with both technological change and with globalization. Those of us from the Clintonian pro-trade persuasion are often accused of advocating better education, and particularly worker retraining, as a substitute for direct government efforts (e.g., trade restrictions) to prevent job dislocations before they happen. Indeed, deriding worker retraining opportunities as a sort of withered booby prize for people who ought to expect their government to protect the jobs they already have is a habit that’s recently spread from protectionist circles to many progressive writers and thinkers, mainly because of growing evidence that high skill levels don’t necessarily insulate workers from offshoring and other globalization-related dislocations.I certainly don’t think of worker retraining as a silver bullet, and don’t intend to get into the general argument over globalization in this post. But as Cohn’s article illustrates, before anyone buries worker retraining as one of many strategies for coping with globalization, maybe we should actually try it, because we haven’t. For all the talk about worker retraining, the U.S. had never made s significant investment in this resource as compared with other countries. And despite many proposals for overhauling our cramped, uneven and bureaucratized system of training programs, and despite several cosmetic changes (i.e., the Workforce Investment Act, following the Job Training Partnership Act), it’s still a mess, and hardly a genuine national commitment.The Clinton administration is partly to blame for the disconnect between its rhetoric of universal and easily accessed worker retraining resources and the underlying reality. This was, in fact, one of those “investments” that never much survived the initial Clinton budget, with its emphasis on deficit reduction. But in my view, the Congresses, including Democratic-controlled Congresses, of the early to mid-1990s, deserve more of the blame, thanks to their bipartisan deficit reduction strategy of freezing spending on various discretionary programs without setting real priorities among them. A new and robust commitment to worker retraining was one of the casualities of this everything’s-equal approach.There remain plenty of proposals out there for getting serious about worker retraining. Back in 1996, former PPI vice president and Under Secretary of Commerce Dr. Rob Shapiro suggested that the “non-discrimination rule” that denies companies tax write-offs for health care benefits unless they are offered to all employees be extended to training and retraining benefits. And it’s not that hard to figure out ways to cut through the bureaucracy and offer workers direct support for retraining, as illustrated by Paul Weinstein’s PPI proposal for “New Economy Scholarships.”My fear is that the debate over the role of worker retraining as a response to globalization is blocking investments and reforms in this area that no progressive should oppose. After all, no one pretends that any government action can eliminate job churn, job loss, or the need for individual workers to upgrade their skills. Why deny workers these opportunities? To prove a point about their insufficiency as a total solution to economic insecurity? Beats me.

One of the odd phenomena in the 2008 presidential runup is the disconnect between Rudy Giuliani’s strong GOP poll ratings and the CW that he can’t get the Republican nomination because of his socially liberal policy stands. Until recently, Rudy has floated above this disconnect, but now a leaked strategy document is giving his opponents an opening to bash him. According to the New York Daily News account of this document, Rudy’s self-identified problems are: “his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; ‘social issues,’ on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.”The leaked strategy document goes on to dwell at great length on a fifth problem, fundraising, and barely gets into the ideological issues he faces. You have to conclude from this document that this ideologically handicapped GOP presidential candidate has a host of preliminary handicaps, personal and ethical, that even his own braintrust considers potentially debilitating. I don’t know how Rudy intends to deal with these handicaps. But I do know how his conservative opponents will exploit them in the early ’08 caucus and primary states, and I suspect “America’s Mayor” will be reduced to “America’s Dogcatcher” before the deal goes down in 2008.

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers gets the new year rolling with a post about the gradual displacement of “liberal” by “progressive” as the key self-identifier of Americans on the left and center-left of our political system. Chris’ history lesson on the subject is basically sound if a bit incomplete. He’s correct in saying that late-nineteenth century Democrats (at least up until the fusion with Populists in 1896) were “liberal” in the European sense of favoring laissez-faire economic policies; there’s a good reason that ur-libertarian Ayn Rand regarded Grover Cleveland as the beau ideal of American political history. But they did not always think of themselves as such, given their espousal of states-rights and constitutional strict-construction doctrines; regular southern Democrats in particular called their party “conservative” through most of the nineteenth century.Likewise, “progressive” was not universally used as the self-identifier of the center-left prior to the New Deal. The term was often used by business interests who thought of advanced capitalism as a historically determined trend. And many Populists, who often argued they were restoring a pre-capitalist Jeffersonian political order, certainly didn’t embrace the label of “progressive,” either. Chris is spot-on in noting that “progressive” became tainted by its association with the pro-communist (or at least anti-anti-communist) Left, especially in 1948. And he’s also right in acknowledging that the revival of the “progressive” self-identification occurred almost simultaneously in two very different parts of the Democratic Party in the 1990s: the anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment Left, and the New Democrat movement in the center-left. I have one quibble with Chris’ suggestion that New Democrats started using the term “progressive” (most notably with the establishment of the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989) “as a means to avoid being labeled as ‘liberal.'” That suggests the terminology was purely cosmetic and non-ideological. In fact, the early New Democrats argued that “liberalism” had become temperamentally reactionary, consumed with defending the dead letter of every single New Deal/Great Society program and policy, while sacrificing the spirit of innovation that made “progressives” progressive. The whole international “Third Way” phenomenon was not designed to produce a moderate middle-point between Left and Right, but instead a reformulation of the progressive mission of the center-left at a time when the Right was successfully battening on popular discontent with outworn social democratic programs. That’s why many of us from the New Dem tradition heartily dislike the “centrist” or “moderate” labels, even though they are hard to escape as a short-hand for intra-party politics. (I could, but won’t, go off into a digression about the unusual nature of the American left, which never even flirted with Marxism, and never really embraced European-style democratic socialism, despite some social-democratic features of the Populist program and the New Deal).As for Chris’ ultimate question about the advisability of “progressive” as a unifying, if not always clarifying, self-identifier for the American left and center-left, I’m certainly comfortable with the P-word as opposed to the L-word. Outside the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (and perhaps to a very limited extent, Germany), the term “liberal” is invariably associated with the political right, while “progressive” has begun to replace “social democratic” as the preferred general term for the left and center-left (the latter process being hastened by the collapse of communism). A particular irritant in any transnational discussion of political terminology has been the variable meaning of the term “neo-liberal,” which outside the US denotes the Thatcher-Reagan revival of the political right based on dogmatic market capitalism, while here it lingers as the chosen self-identifier for those proto-New Democrats of the 1980s associated with the germinal thinking of the Washington Monthly in those days, which reached its brief zenith in Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. Even if “progressives” often disagree on a host of issues, the term reminds us of our common moorings in a tradition that is hostile to inherited or state-backed privilege, committed to equal opportunity, cognizant of the ultimate solidarity of all human beings, and determined to both accept and shape the forces of change through collective action. That’s why I’m a progressive, anyway.

Regular readers of this blog know I am not one of those who view Joe Lieberman as some sort of demonic figure, or as a key factor in the Iraq mess, or as the incarnation of the DC Establishment. Lots of the attacks on him for allegedly stabbing Bill Clinton or Al Gore in the back are demonstrably misguided. Generally speaking, Lieberman has been a solid if occasionally heretical Democrat with one anachronistic flaw–his belief that George W. Bush or his party have done anything to merit “bipartisanship”–and one very large blind spot–Iraq.After reading his Washington Post op-ed today calling for an escalation of troop deployments in Iraq, it’s clear that blind spot isn’t clearing up; if anything, it’s getting larger. At best, it reads like the call for a tactic that might have theoretically made sense a couple of years ago. At worst, it represents a prescription for making the disastrous course of U.S. post-invasion policy in Iraq an even bigger disaster.Lieberman’s assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq is wildly counter-intuitive and counter-factual. He would have us believe that al Qaeda and Iran are actively cooperating to thwart an emerging “moderate consensus” in Iraq that supports the current Maliki government. Iran, he suggests, is fully backing the Mahdi Army “extremists,” who must be excluded, along with al Qaeda-backed Sunni “extremists,” from a government based on “Sunni and Shiite moderates.” An additional U.S. troop deployment–not a temporary “surge,” it appears, but an expansion of the U.S. military presence until such time as “security” is assured, will do the trick. Otherwise, Iraq will descend into civil war.Lord a’mighty, even the White House seems more realistic than Joe at this point. There aren’t enough “Sunni moderates” left in Iraq to amount to anything. Maliki depends very explicitly on support from the Mahdi Army, and indirectly on support from Tehran. Iran’s main client in Iraq is SCIRI and its Badr Corps militia, presumably a main factor in the “Shiite moderate” forces Lieberman is counting on. And by any definition–certainly the key one of whether the government has a monopoly on the use of force, or even on the use of force by its own employees in the police or the military–Iraq is already in a state of civil war.At least those in the administration who favor the so-called “80% solution”–openly backing the Shia in an effort to crush the Sunni insurgency once and for all–are honest in admitting we have to choose between two threats at present, and favor an expansion of Iranian influence as less damaging to our long-term interests. Lieberman’s approach–committing more U.S. troops to a new two-front war against the Sunni insurgents and the Mahdi Army, in support of a shaky pro-Iranian and pro-Sadr government–is a 0% solution, likely to do nothing more than increase the near-universal conviction of Iraqis that our presence is a plague that must be ended, preferably at the precise moment when their preferred faction is in ascendancy.Having spent much of the last year investing as much rhetoric in attacking Tehran as in attacking al Qaeda, Joe Lieberman apparently can’t bring himself to admit that there is no course of action, other than beginning troop withdrawals, that can maintain U.S. neutrality between the two threats. But no one else need follow Lieberman into the prison of his own logic about Iraq, or willfully accept his blind spot.It’s time for Joe to re-focus on global climate change, or health care, or tax reform, or oversight hearings into the Katrina disaster. Anything but Iraq.

In the pre-Christmas frenzy, I missed Damon Linker’s very interesting take on the religio-political implications of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, which will appear in the next print edition of The New Republic. Like everyone else, Linker noted polls showing hostility to the prospect of a Mormon president, especially among evangelical Christians. But like me, Linker suspects that the recent ecumenical movement towards a Christian Right united front could ultimately lead the most politically radicalized conservative Gentiles (to use the Mormon term for non-Mormons) to deem Romney kosher.After all, the Mormons have built a righteous commonwealth in Utah that undoubtedly inspires admiration and envy among conservative Christians generally, not only in terms of godly personal morality, but as reflected in the large and generous LDS social welfare system. And at a time when the Christian Right appears far more interested in the wordly implications of theology than in its other-wordly claims, do qualms about eccentric Mormon doctrines really matter any more?The polls say yes, but time will tell if Romney’s candidacy does for Mormons what JFK’s candidacy did for Catholics–detoxifying his faith even as he benefits from strong and avid support from his co-religionists.Much of Linker’s article actually focuses on a very different issue: should those of us who aren’t members of the Christian Right worry about Romney’s faith? Linker thinks we should, primarily because of peculiar LDS beliefs about American-based prophecy that could place pressure on a Mormon president to erect a theocracy. I’m not completely convinced by his arguments, but he does make an excellent case that Romney, like JFK, has to make up his mind whether he wants Americans to vote for him because, or in spite of, his religion.