My colleague The Moose did a post this morning playing off fresh charges by the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that the administration took the whole faith-based project about as seriously as, well, “compassionate conservatism” in general.But nestled in the post was another subject on which The Moose and I share a healthy obsession: the scheduled demise of the federal estate tax, a.k.a, in Republican-speak, the “death tax.”The Moose specifically proposed reinstating a reformed version of the estate tax and dedicating the money to a real faith-based initiative. But aside from that particular idea, I think Democrats, as a matter of basic principle, ought to single out the estate tax repeal as a Bush/GOP outrage that must not be allowed to stand.This happens to be one issue where the standard lefty critique of centrist Democrats has some merit. At some point during the 1990s, the GOPers did some focus groups and discovered that sizeable majorities of voters didn’t like the idea of family farmers and small business owners getting hit with high-rate federal inheritance taxes when they were struggling to keep the farm or business in the family for the next generation. They also discovered that calling the inheritance tax a “death tax” pushed even more buttons. Nothing excites Republicans more than finding an issue where they can simultaneously win votes and richly reward their richest constituencies. So not suprisingly, abolishing the “death tax” became a standard feature of GOP tax proposals in the Age of Newt, bearing poisonous fruit when Bush took office amidst spectacular budget surpluses and got the chance to cut taxes.A goodly number of Democrats–especially those from marginal and/or rural districts–saw those polls and just flat-out caved (for the record, the DLC never did so, and in fact made the “death tax repeal” an object of particular hostility and derision). In fact, other than the so-called “marriage penalty” adjustment, repeal of federal inheritance taxes probably got more Democratic support in Congress than any other feature of the Bush tax package. That was then. This is now. And now Democrats should seriously consider making opposition to a permanent “death tax repeal” a signature issue. Why? Well, for one thing, repealing inheritance taxes strikes at the very heart of a long–and until recently, bipartisan–American tradition of progressive taxation in which the burden of self-government falls on wealth as well as work. (As The Moose often points out, Teddy Roosevelt was the father of the federal estate tax). There are three ways to get very, very rich. One is to earn it with actual work (a rare but not impossible feat). A second is to earn it through investment income. And a third is to inherit it. (A fourth, I suppose, is to marry it, perhaps more than once, but we’re not talking about Sen. John Warner here). A broad-based tax system should not mysteriously exempt the third source of enormous wealth, especially since it is the one that rewards birth-status rather than effort or initiative or good judgment, and that serves virtually no economic purpose. Moreover, truly dangerous and immoral concentrations of wealth often take generations to accumulate, with inheritances serving as the crucial link between economically rational and irrational–indeed, anti-competitive–consolidations of market power. To put it another way, accepting the abolition of inheritance taxes makes any consistent and progressive fiscal philosophy incoherent. We’re gonna tax high earners and small investors, but not big fat trust fund babies? Oh, really? Aside from the principles involved, I am convinced Democrats can turn public opinion around on the estate tax. The extremist abolitionism of the GOP on this issue makes it easy for Democrats to be reasonable, in a way that’s far more difficult in the complicated world of marginal rates on income. For years, most Democrats have supported a reform of the federal estate tax that would raise the threshold for applying it high enough to exempt virtually every legitimate small family farm or small business, and perhaps even lower the rates, which are significantly higher than for corporate or personal incomes. That would essentially return the estate tax to a simple, progressive purpuse: a tax on the inheritence of very large personal fortunes–a “billionaire’s tax,” to demagogue it just a little, in the spirit of “death tax.” Let the GOPers defend that, for a change. Pivoting public opinion on inheritence taxes will require the kind of sustained, loud Democratic attention that is currently being paid to Social Security privatization. But it’s worth it, both morally and politically. Repealing the estate tax is a central pillar of the GOP’s plan to eventually shift the federal tax base entirely from wealth to work, with the goal of not only “starving the beast” of government, but of turning heavily taxed people of modest means into anti-tax zealots while solidifying the Republican Party’s iron pact with the most privileged and powerful economic interests in the country. So: if and when the Beast of Bush’s SocSec proposal is slain or at least firmly caged, I nominate “death to the death tax repeal” as a Big Fight worth having, and winning.

We all know George W. Bush doesn’t like to admit mistakes, preferring to flip-flop without acknowledging it when mistakes become unsustainable. And we also know that he has gone longer without vetoing a congressional bill than any president in living memory–rarely even rattling a veto pen as a threat.So what to make of his sudden announcement late last week that he would veto any effort to change the 2003 Medicare Rx drug bill that’s become an ongoing source of embarassment to the administration, and a potential multi-facted disaster in the future?It’s hard to find a recent domestic policy initiative that was born in such a series of Keystone Kops capers. The administration’s claims that the benefit would cost a mere $400 billion over five years–a number that only passed the laugh test because the benefit’s implementation was deliberately delayed until 2006–was widely disputed at the time. The House, famously, had to keep the roll call open for, oh, about fifteen times the normal period in order to get the votes to pass it, and succeeded, famously, only after a series of thuggish threats and blanishments, one of which earned Tom DeLay one of his three reprimands from the Ethics Committee last year.Meanwhile, as GOPers high-fived themselves for coming up with an approach to a hot-button issue that would stoke up health care industry donations while making seniors feel all warm and cuddly inside, the ink was barely dry before it became apparent old folks didn’t much like it. Even the easy part–accepting a drug discount card–wasn’t popular, even though millions of Medicare beneficiaries were signed up automatically. And as we get closer to the implementation of the full Rx drug program, with its steep premiums, skimpy coverage, and wildly complicated structure, it isn’t likely to become the biggest senior sensation since Viagra (even if Viagra is, as reported, covered by the benefit).I mention all this to provide the proper perspective for Bush’s banty rooster crowing about his brave stance in defense of his Medi-Mess.”I signed Medicare reform proudly and any attempt to limit the choices of our seniors and to take away their prescription drug coverage under Medicare will meet my veto,” quoth he, calling the Rx drug benefit “a landmark achievement in American health care.”It was a landmark, all right, but not one of achievement, but of obfuscation and deliberate efforts to mislead the country in the dogged pursuit of power.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s feature-length raspberry mocking the small-government pretensions of the GOP in today’s New York Times doesn’t blaze any new paths, but it’s fun reading anyway, full of quotes from past and present Republican “revolutionaries” deploring the party’s current addiction to raw red ink, straight up. My colleague The Moose, who was present at the creation of the Republican Revolution of 1995, gets off the best line: “The era of big government being over is over.” But there’s a sober point here that shouldn’t be forgotten. A big, fat federal government that tries to do too much is arguably a bad thing. But a big, fat federal government that fails to meet all the big national challenges, and hardly does anything well, is far, far worse. And the trajectory of Washington in the Age of Bush is the worst possibility of all: a big, fat government that hardly does anything other than paying off debt and serving the interests of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens.

Well, I thought there was a fairly strong consensus among Democrats that the 2004 elections showed we have to expand, as well as “energize” our party base. But now comes Chris Bowers on the MyDD site with the news that the University of Michigan’s National Election Project study of the 2004 results “proves” there are no swing voters, and winning in the future is all about increasing polarization and mobilizing the Democratic base. Now, before wading into this issue, let me stipulate total agreement with Chris on how we ought to talk with each other about it. He says it’s a matter of strategy, not ideology. Personally, if I could be convinced that the best way to drive today’s Republicans from their ruinous power is to polarize Democrats as much as Republicans, I’d be out there on the barricades right away. It’s sure as hell a simpler strategy than coming up with a policy agenda and message that actually meets the challenges facing the nation, and mobilization is always easier than persuasion. So I’m down with that. But I’ve seen no real evidence Chris is right on the strategic front.I don’t know if Chris is actually looking at the NEP data (maybe, like me, he’s still trying to figure out how to access it intelligibly), but his announcement that “there’s no middle” in U.S. politics seems to rely on a very selective interpretation of the initial take on the study by David Kopoian on Ruy Teixeira’s Donkey Rising site, zeroing in on Bush’s remarkable support levels from Republicans, and Kerry’s strong but less-impressive support levels from Democrats. As Greg Wythe quickly pointed out, Chris sorta kinda ignores independents, who are a sizable bloc of the electorate (how large depends, of course, on your definition of that term), and creates a straw man wherein the “search for the mythical middle” is all about crossover voting from self-identified partisans. There’s no question that the parties have been ideologically realigned in recent decades, and that largely explains why the “crossover” vote has dropped. But it’s a logical fallacy of a very high order to go from that observation to a claim that promoting even more ideological polarization will somehow magically produce the Democratic majorities needed to win elections, which is what Chris seems to be saying. Let’s remember that the percentage of the electorate self-identifying with the Donkey has been slowly and steadily eroding, most notably since 2000. You can make an argument (folks on the Left have been making it for years) that the voters leaving the party are doing so because it is insufficiently Left-leaning in policy, or partisan in strategy and tactics. But it’s hardly self-evident, and in important respects is counter-intuitive.On that score, you should take a look at a small but remarkable John Judis piece in the current New Republic. John is not what you’d call a “centrist” in ideology or outlook, and has specifically spent a lot of time trying to show that large demographic trends are creating a strong tailwind for Democrats, whose “base” is expanding almost automatically. This point of view, of course, is very consistent with Chris Bowers’ idea that we just have to get out there and harvest these voters with a powerful partisan message. But Judis’ latest piece, based largely on a series of discussions with a leading Hispanic organizer in the Southwest, suggests that this particular element of the supposed Democratic “base” is in grave danger, in part because Republicans know how to do “deep organizing” rather than campaign- or Internet-based “parachuting,” but also because the GOP is winning the cultural argument among a growing number of Hispanic voters. He doesn’t quite put it this way, but Judis suggests that our problem in this community is not easily attributable to the failure of Democrats to advocate, say, a single-payer health care system, or to more stridently oppose Bush’s national security policies. But the other point Judis is implicitly making is that our ideas about “base” and “swing” voters are often way out of whack with reality. Ask ten Democrats about our party base, and nine of them will start talking about Hispanics and African-Americans and labor union members and anti-war activists and professional women, and so forth. Karl Rove doesn’t think like that. He views Hispanics as a “swing” group because he knows Republicans simply need to cut into Democratic majorities in that category to win close general elections. He views African-Americans as a “swing” group as well, not because half of them are “undecided” in any given election, but because getting 16 percent of the black vote in Ohio, in part through a carefully targeted cultural message, may have won Bush re-election. “Swing” voters are individuals, whatever group they are in, who are persuadable. And we’re nuts if we don’t take the opportunity to persuade them seriously. Had John Kerry done as well as Al Gore–much less Bill Clinton–in Republican “base” areas outside the metro cores of the country, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It’s all about votes, every goddamn one of them, not about groups we “mobilize” or write off. We really do need to end the false choice between “mobilization” and “persuasion” and get on the with job of doing both.

Nine seconds after I published the last post touting Bob Dylan for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota, a colleague informed me that his candidacy might be impeded by “these really creepy ads he’s doing for Victoria’s Secret.” That’s what I get for never watching television.
So here’s my last suggestion, unless it’s not: the Coen Brothers. Interest in the candidacy could be significantly enhanced by a party-wide debate over which Coen Brother should run: Ethan or Joel? Joel or Ethan? You betcha and darn tootin.’
And BTW, who knew how many Jewish celebrities seem to have grown up in Minnesota? I mean, what’s the Jewish percentage of the population up there, maybe one-fourth of one percent? Next thing you know, somebody’s going to email me to let me know the Marx Brothers were actually born in Sauk Center, or that Sandy Koufax went to St. Olaf’s.
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
I guess it’s time to say to the Jewish community of the upper Midwest: Mazel Tov!

A remarkable number of kind readers have emailed me in response to my last post, to let me know that Kirby Puckett may have, er, ah, some personal issues that would make him a less than ideal candidate to beef up the Democratic “family values” message. (It’s interesting: I did a long post the same day wishing Howard Dean good luck at the DNC, which you might think would raise an eyebrow or two, and absolutely nobody noticed. But a joking reference to a celebrity or two really lit up the boards. Maybe I should get to work on post exploring the relevance of Prince Charles’ engagement to the Social Security battle).
In any event, I thought Al Franken’s expected announcement that he would run for Mark Dayton’s Senate seat meant I could suspend my “draft a celebrity” search. But now it appears he was just joking.
So now maybe it’s time to think about Minnesota native Bob Dylan. There should definitely be a place in Washington for the author of “Idiot Wind.”

Just when I was getting all excited about launching a “Put a Prince in the Senate” boomlet in MN, an alert reader named Aaron Brethorst reminded me that His Royal Badness (the proper appelation for the Artist Once Formerly Known As Prince) is a Jehovah’s Witness. Among that sect’s peculiar beliefs is a fidelity to the Radical Reformation tradition of refusing to hold public office. (And for those of you who just think of Jehovah’s Witnesses as the strange folks who press copies of Watchtower on you as you race towards your next appointment, they suffered brutal persecution by the Nazis for their defiance of secular authority).
In any event, this deflating news was an appropriate rebuke for my hubristic dabbling in recent popular music culture. I can cite rock lyrics
from the Beatles through Roxy Music and New Wave and up to early Punk with encyclopedic recall. And in part due to my parental responsibilities, I’ve tried to make a Rock Snob comeback with casual mastery of the oeuvres of White Stripes and Sleater-Kinney (both of whom I genuinely like), and have even risked narcolepsy by spending a lot of time in the company of Radiohead and Wilco. But the 80s and early 90s found me listening to NPR more than college radio; I’d rather watch paint peeling than music videos (which to me represent the final victory of the basic this-ain’t-about-the-music ethos of Disco); and thus, I am uniquely ill-equipped to promote Rock Gods of that era for public office.
But as another reader suggested: maybe we should find out if Kirby Puckett is a Democrat!

With the news that Sen. Mark Dayton has decided against running for another term next year, Dems are worried about holding this must-hold seat, and beginning to mull over other potential candidates.
So let’s consider the ideal candidate profile: a Minnesotan with high name ID, smarts, charisma, a good work ethic, appeal across party lines and outside political circles, and enough dough to self-finance a lavish race.
Put it in the computer and you’ve got: that’s right, His Purple Badness, Prince!
Wonder where he is on Social Security? Josh Marshall, call your office.

The Bush administration is conducting quite a tutorial this week in the dark art of cooking the fiscal books.
First, you’ve got the by-now-customary virtuosity with which the Bushies deal with the costs of their tax cuts. Back in ’01, of course, they sold their tax cut package as only costing a little over a trillion smackers by pretending the cuts would expire. Then, suddenly, they treated any suggestion that the cuts would indeed expire as a call for “tax increases,” and also narrowed the budget window so that the visible cost of permanent tax cuts would be vastly lowballed as well. The latest wrinkle in this game is the administration’s proposal that budget rules be changed to estimate the cost of extending or making permanent any and all tax cuts as zero. Quite a sequence, eh? Distort the cost, then minimize it, then officially abolish it. The definitive piece the DLC published opposing Bush’s original tax cuts was entitled “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and that’s turned out to be a more prophetic title than we imagined.
Now, with the Medicare Rx drug benefit the administration pushed through Congress in 2003, the Bushies couldn’t play exactly the same kind of game. I mean, what’s the point of announcing a new entitlement program if you’re going to pretend it’s only an entitlement for a few years? To be sure, the administration and its congressional allies messed around with the phase-in of the new benefit to hide the true costs. By delaying the full implementation until 2006, they were able to squint sideways at the benefit and claim it just might squeak by at a ten-year cost of under $400 billion, which is all the congressional budget guidelines allowed. And moreover, they hoped to build support for the benefit by putting the easy candy up front–a cost-free drug discount card–hoping seniors would buy into the program before they had to deal with the convoluted, expensive, yet disappointingly stingy premium and coverage system involved in the whole enchilada.
Nobody really believed the original numbers, though the administration went to great lengths to hide internal estimates showing the true cost ballooning like a carbo-loading refugee from an Atkins clinic. This week, almost casually, the administration let it be known that the true ten-year cost of the benefit will come in at a cool $1.2 trillion. If you believe their estimates of premium revenue and of “offsets” from seniors leaving Medicaid for the shiny new Medicare, hey, it’s only $720 billion! Such a deal.
The bottom line is that these folks are resourceful and absolutely shameless when it comes to cooking the fiscal books. And as Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois pointedly remarked at a congressional hearing yesterday: these are the same guys who want us to believe their 50-year Social Security cost and revenue estimates are right on the money.
With this administration, what we need is not so much independent counsels, but independent accountants.

Now that Howard Dean is certain to be elected the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I’ve been getting some emails asking me if I’m going to attack the guy and generally create a new excuse for people to ignore everything else I say. I’m amused that anybody thinks my opinion on this particular subject matters at all, but actually, I’m happy to congratulate the Doctor and wish him the best of luck in a tough, important, and often thankless job.
Like supporters of John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lieberman and Al Sharpton, I opposed Governor Dean’s presidential candidacy. (For the record, I was a Kerry supporter from the beginning).
Dean’s candidacy for DNC chair has been a different matter. I did a post back in November wondering why he wanted the job. I also suggested that the DNC was pretty much an empty fortress where there wouldn’t be any resistance to Dean-style ideas about netroots-based fundraising and organizing, or for that matter, a fighting partisan tone (out-Republican-bashing Terry McAuliffe would be a pretty tall order). And I continue to believe that those Deanies who think his chairmanship represents some sort of revolution are going to be disappointed by the warm welcome they will get over on South Capitol Street, where the only heads available to put on a pike will be those of the failed political consultants who have (I hope) received their last checks from the DNC.
But none of that really matters. The Doctor’s campaign for the party chairmanship focused on the need to broaden the party’s financial base, tap the activist energy so evident in 2004, and rebuild threadbare state party infrastructures nationwide. And he has consistently said he won’t engage in policy or ideological fights that will get in the way of that task, usurp the policy-making role of elected officials, or disturb party unity.
So I sincerely wish him well. And I join those Democrats who are steeling themselves to fight against a definite and long-planned GOP effort to drag up and exaggerate every controversial thing Dean said last year to paint Democrats as a party lurching towards the left. I’m sure the Doctor knows he will be playing by a different set of rules than previous party chairs–you might call them Hillary Rules, insofar as every word out of his mouth will be distorted and exploited by the GOP to reinforce right-wing stereotypes. Like Sen. Clinton, he will have to measure his words far more than is rightly fair, and like Sen. Clinton, he might want to throw a few counter-stereotypical comments into his public utterances to surprise people and set the record straight.
Above all, the changing of the guard at the DNC should be an occasion for Democrats to remind themselves they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, we need an energized activist base, but we also need to expand that base into hostile or indifferent territory until we get a majority. Yes, we need more (and more broad-based) money and better mechanics, but we also need a winning message. And yes, we need to reform the party, but that won’t matter if we don’t stand as a party for reform ideas which address the weaknesses (above all on national security, values and culture, and the role of government) that unnecessarily keep voters from supporting our candidates–ideas which enable us to expose the inner rot of the Republican ascendancy.
The DNC’s unique role is to deal with activists, money, mechanics, and party reform, and Howard Dean brings a strong resume and considerable enthusiasm to those tasks. Expanding the base, developing a winning message, and articulating a progressive reform agenda–those are tasks in which all Democrats must participate, and where the main impetus must come far from South Capitol Street, out there in the heartland and its electoral battlegrounds.