Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris laid down an interesting challenge the other day on the Political Animal site. Noting a Court of Appeals ruling in Ohio that declared state and local tax subsidies to corporations re-locating within the U.S. a violation of the Commerce Clause, Glastris suggested that progressives might be able to unite behind this idea as a way to dramatize our opposition to corporate welfare.
Unlike Glastris, I do have a law degree, but my Commerce Clause training is a couple of decades old, and I’m skeptical that this holding would survive Supreme Court review.
I have always, however, believed that the economic development philosophy that underlies most corporate subsidies is deeply flawed, and should in fact become a point of attack for Democrats nationally and in the states. The Progressive Policy Institute’s Rob Atkinson has been a consistent critic of development strategies based on individual corporate subsidies and on the theory that lowering business costs (as opposed to improving the overall business climate, which includes a good environment, first-class public education, strong research institutions, and a highly trained workforce) is the right way to attract private investment and good jobs. The DLC has also promoted this advice to state policymakers near and far, noting that if low business costs were the true measure of economic development potential, then Mississippi would be the economic dynamo of the nation and the world.
Reading through the comments to Glastris’ post, I was surprised at their general tenor: sure, most respondents said, it would be nice if we could curb smoke-stack chasing through corporate subsidies, but it would also be political suicide. I don’t know about that. In my own home region, the South, there has been a raging debate in economic development and political circles for years on this subject. Way back in the late 1970s, then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas began shifting his state away from this approach, arguing instead for home-grown industries and a higher quality of life. For the most part, Georgia has avoided incentives-based competition for companies, particularly the high-stakes bidding wars over big auto plants. Mark Warner has focused Virginia’s economic development strategy on better education, stronger work-force development, and deployment of new technologies, especially in rural areas. And with the possible exception of Alabama, I don’t think there’s any southern state exclusively committed to the old approach, though recent Republican gains in the region may well turn the clock back significantly.
Where I may differ from Glastris is that I don’t think this is the sort of subject where Democrats should simply rely on the courts, much less champion court intervention. States and localities should give up on the corporate-subsidy, low-road, market-our-weaknesses approach because it’s simply not the right path to long-term, high-wage, high-quality-of-life development, not because they are told to by the courts. Moreover, if I understand the court of appeals ruling (which I, too, have not yet read), it sounds a little too sweeping. There’s nothing wrong with offering industry-wide (as opposed to company-specific) inducements to private capital that don’t begger public services or compromise local workers or communities. Customized training, industry-labor-educational institution partnerships, or highly targeted and enforced job tax credits may sometimes make sense, and may reinforce a community’s overall strengths without creating a race-to-the-bottom competition with other communities. (Here’s a link to a good resource for separating the sheep from the goats in providing business development incentives.)
But I’m really glad Glastris brought this up, because the general habit of recruiting capital through corporate subsidies is not only hard to shake, but is a perfect reflection of the kind of economic growth strategy the Bush administration is trying to impose on the whole damn country.

For those of you with an unslaked thirst for post-election analysis, Mark Gersh, probably Washington’s most respected Democratic number-cruncher, offers a detailed look at the late presidential election in the new edition of Blueprint Magazine. After drawing a few general conclusions, he gets down into the nitty-gritty of the results in three key battleground states: Pennylvania, Ohio and Florida. Gersh’s main point is that the Kerry-Edwards campaign actually did as good a job as can be expected in turning out the Democratic base vote. But it wasn’t enough in Ohio and Florida, and was barely enough in PA, because the Democratic percentage of the electorate is shrinking. We need a persuasion as well as a mobilization strategy in the future, and we need to expand the base, not simply motivate it to turn out.
The full article is available online through the link above, but if you want to see the cool, multi-colored, county-by-county charts Gersh produced, you’ll have to get the hard copy.

As the unanswered questions about now-abandoned Homeland Security Secretary nominee Bernard Kerik continue to mount, I’ve stopped thinking about Kerik and started thinking about the rich irony of an administration that can’t seem to conduct a competent background check trying to appoint this guy as head of the department whose ability to conduct competent background checks is kind of important to the task of keeping the rest of us alive.
I mean, I don’t know the ultimate truth about Kerik, and I gather he was a pretty good Top Cop, but Lord-a-mighty: forget the nanny stuff, which by now should be a basic part of the vetting process. You’ve got allegations of mob links, financial improprities, violations of ethics rules, threats against a former romantic interest, cronyism, and who knows what’s next? And nobody was able to ferret out any of this damaging material, unless Kerik brought it forth himself?
Makes you wonder if the sleuthing model of this admninistration is Inspector Clouseau.

Opening up the WaPo op-ed pages today gave me a nasty jolt. “Mr. Kilgore’s False Start” was the title of the lead editorial, which rapped the Republican Attorney General of Virginia for a typically demagogic comment pointing out that Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine, his probable opponent for the governorship next year, once defended death row inmates.
I’ve been dreading this for a while. Certainly people who happened to be named Bush or Nixon or Reagan have gone through this in the past, but my own name is rare enough outside Georgia, Alabama and Texas that people just naturally assume I’m related to ol’ Jerry, especially since I live in Virginia. Already I’ve gotten used to introducing myself to Virginia Democratic folk with the immediate disclaimer: “No relation, biologically or ideologically.”
There’s certainly nothing about the name that would naturally connote the infinitely snooty Virginia Republican pedigree. “Kilgore” is a classic Scotch-Irish Appalachian name, redolent of red clay hills, pioneer rambling, and a taste for 100 proof Calvinism and moonshine, often at the same time. The name itself means “tender of goats,” or perhaps “church by the goat stream,” with “goats” being the unmistakable root.
But to my sorrow, this honorable cracker name will be associated for at least the next year with the agenda of the Virginia GOP. I’ve thought of avoiding the problem by temporarily adopting a hip-hop name like “Special K” or something. But why should I? I’m older than Jerry, and am putting our common name to a better use.
It kinda reminds me of an incident back in the McCarthy era, when some Republican Congressman arose on the House floor to demand that the Cincinnati Reds baseball team change its name to avoid association with Godless Communism. One of the Reds’ players (doubtless with a jaw full of Red Man to clinch the point) quickly responded: “Let the Communists change their name. We had it first.”

Boy, the stuff that keeps trickling out about the Big Fat Omnibus Appropriations Bill that the GOP Masters of Washington put together is just amazing. You’ve got the language that allowed congressional appropriations staffers to peer into every federal tax return in America. You’ve got the grimy little gotcha that transportation cardinal Ernest Istook pulled on northeastern and midwestern Republicans who had the temerity to call for more AMTRAK money.
And now, you’ve got the rider nestled into the bill by Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) that would overturn three decades of federal law and policy to authorize the sale of wild horses and burros on federal lands to foreign-run slaughterhouses for consumption at upscale eateries in France, Belgium and Japan.
For a calm, reasoned analysis of the Burns howler, check out today’s New Dem Daily.
But I can’t help but wonder what Democrats could do with this development if we were as nasty and dishonest as Republicans.
You know what we’d do? We’d print up millions of flyers with four images: one of Burns, one of Misty of Chincoteague, one of Eeyore, and one of an obese Frenchman with a huge napkin tucked into his shirt, eying a big platter of mystery meat.
“SAVE OUR FRIENDS!” the text would scream. “CALL MR. BURNS IN WASHINGTON AND TELL HIM TO STOP THE KILLING NOW!”
And we’d distribute the flyers outside every elementary school in America.

The Moose and I have been hinting for a while that the slowly unfolding scandal involving conservative godfather Jack Abramoff, former Tom DeLay staffer Michael Scanlon, and a series of incredibly cynical shakedowns of Louisiana and Texas Indian Tribes, could be The Big One in taking down a generation of Republican hucksters while exposing the internal rot and corruption of the Conservative Establishment in Washington. This scandal, which a variety of federal law enforcement agencies, and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee (now under the chairmanship of Establishment Right bete noir John McCain) are investigating, has already implicated Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and Rep. Bob Ney of OH, and more importantly, could shine a big spotlight on the extent to which Mammon is the true God of today’s self-righteous conservatives.
But there’s more: in the latest Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson interprets the scandal as signalling the death throes of the Republican Revolution of 1994, the event that brought so many of the players in the Abramoff affair into proximity to power, despite all their talk about cleaning up the Augean Stables of Washington.
This is a pretty big deal, if you recall that The Standard was essentially created to serve as the voice of that Revolution. And Kristol’s magazine is not the only source of charges that the Revolution is expiring in a toxic Thermidor of corruption and power-mania: no less a figure than Newt Gingrich has expressed disgust with House Republicans’ hubristic decision to publicly and preemtively protect Tom DeLay’s power against the possibility that he will be indicted for a major felony.
Aside from its symbolic importance, the Ferguson piece is a useful connect-the-dots account of the scandal, and of the personal relationships in the conservative movement that helped Abramoff set himself up as the Big Dog on K Street. My favorite quote in the piece is what Grover Norquist said back in 1995 when Abramoff first set himself up as a lobbyist: “What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs. Then this becomes a different town.”
Not much question about that.

There is, praise Jehovah, a growing consensus among Democrats that we have to become a “reform” party in order to properly critique the ever-growing pig-sty in Washington that the GOP is wallowing in, and also in order to build trust with an electorate that still views the Democratic Party as representing government to voters rather than the other way around.
True, many Democrats who are sharing the reform pew don’t trust each other to sing from the same hymnal. Dean/MoveOn types think of Clintonian New Democrats as The Corporate Establishment, no matter how often we shriek (as we’ve done for more than a decade) about ending corporate welfare and opposing corporate cronyism. And we Clintonian New Democrat types aren’t sure Dean/MoveOn insurgents understand that the Washington status quo includes the leaders of many of the Democratic interest-and-constituency groups they think of as the party’s base. And all of us fear that Congressional Democrats will be tempted to view themslves as the once-and-future barons of important committees and subcommittees rather than as a besieged minority fighting for survival.
But a common acceptance of the imperative of being a reform party is a good start. And we ought to be able to agree on a few basic reform agenda items. The DLC has suggested election reform, political reform, budget reform, and tax reform as a start, and there’s no particular reason I can think of that any Democrat, regardless of ideological background, should object to that agenda.
Our current plight reminds me of an anecdote about two southern legislators who went out on the town with the state prison warden. Fifteen drinks later, the solons were a little out of control, and the warden, having no better idea, took them back to the prison and put them in a cell to sleep it off. Next morning one of the legislators woke up, ran to the barred window, looked out on the exercise yard, saw the guard towers, and ran over to his colleague and yelled: “We’re in the penitentiary. Do you remember them putting us in here?” And the other legislator, head in hands, replied: “Hell, I don’t even remember the trial.”
We need to forget the arguments about how we got into our current political trap, and concentrate on getting out, and that means some serious jail-breaking, hell-raising ideas for reform.

Have you given up entirely on Congress or the administration doing anything constructive on the environment? Couldn’t really blame you, given the recent record, and the general attitude of Washington’s current management that environmental initiatives reflect either (a) the ravings of pagan eco-terrorists who want snail darters to take over every middle-manager’s back-yard swimming pool, or (b) the secret comeback strategy of socialist central planners to control the commanding hights of the economy.
But a lot of people have forgotten that the first big round of environmental initiatives in the early 1970s began not in Washington but in the states, and that most recent progress on the environment has involved place-based local coalitions like the one that helped avoid an eco-catastrophe in the Chesapeake Bay.
Maybe it’s time to look around the country to find ways to regain national momentum towards a better environment. Check out a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute that outlines four “green strategies” that federal policymakers should be urged to emulate, before it’s too late.

Since my last post, I continued my travels from Colorado to Vermont and back home to Virginia.
In Vermont, I helped facilitate a DLC “values-based agenda-setting” training session for a large group of Democratic elected officials, most of them part of the party’s new majority in the state legislature. As has been the case in many of the sixteen or seventeen similar trainings I’ve co-facilitated over the last seven years (all in all, nearly 500 state and local elected officials have gone through this program), some of the participants came in with pre-conceived, and often mixed or negative impressions of the DLC. This was particularly true in Montpelier where, as you can imagine, a lot of Democrats are big fans of their former Governor, Howard Dean. But I’m reasonably sure just about everyone left the training happy, and with a very different view of the DLC, since the whole purpose of the training is to help Democrats wherever we go better articulate their own values, and develop policy goals and ideas tailored to the particular needs of their states. There’s no “left, right or center” in these sessions, and nobody postures as the only “real Democrats;” we treat each other with equal respect.
Why do I mention this? Because the blogosphere is beginning to crowd up again with some intra-party venom, much of it related to the DNC chairmanship competition, and a fair amount aimed at the DLC as a favorite whipping boy. But I saw none of that in Vermont, in Colorado, and in Alabama, the three wildly different places where I’ve work with diverse groups of Democrats over the last two weeks.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not for party unity as an end in itself, and if there are real matters of principle, strategy or policy we need to fight about, then let’s choose up sides and have at it.
But I am tired beyond belief of fights among Democrats based on nothing more than labels, stereotypes, conspiracy theories and name calling. I didn’t see that in traveling round the country, but it’s never more than a click away online, and in Washington.
So I’m glad to be home, but after many fine days of working with elected Democrats of every stripe who are rediscovering their common values, I’m sad to be back in the land where my immediate challenge is whether to dignify the likes of David Sirota with a response to his latest round of baseless ad hominem attacks on me and my colleagues as evil corporate agents selling out working people to the Bavarian Illuminati, blah blah, bark bark woof woof. This sort of “dialog” is a lose-lose proposition, and it makes me want to go back out where Democrats are more interested in win-win discussions.

Yesterday I got via the email transom an article, slated for publication in The American Prospect, entitled “The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code.” The author, one David Sirota, sent along his piece with a missive saying, in part, that “various ‘red state’ and ‘red region’ Democrats are already showing the party how to win in conservative areas. The key is to fundamentally reject the corporate/DLC argument–and follow those who continue to win with a progressive populist message.” (emphasis in original).
That let me know right away that Sirota is one of those guys whose knowledge of the DLC is unencumbered by any actual information on what we believe, write, say and do, other than what he’s picked up on the Democratic Underground site, or in the Collected Works of Bob Borosage.
It turns out the whole piece pretty much lives down to my initial expectations.
I hate to sound like a pointy-head here, but the argument Sirota’s making–that economic ‘populism’ of the most atavistic sort trumps cultural conservatism–has been around for a long time, dating back at least to the early ’70s. Yet Sirota seems to think he’s the first to discover it; hence the “Da Vinci Code” title, and article’s breathless claim, repeated often with the tone of revelation, that beating back the Cultural Right is real easy if you just keep appealing to the ol’ pocketbook.
But it’s the specific examples cited by Sirota for his post-election satori that are especially weird.
He was involved with Brian Schweitzer’s campaign in Montana, so unsurprisingly the Governor-Elect of that state is his Exhibit 1. And he usefully explains how Schweitzer blasted Montana Republicans for corporate subsidies, government inefficiency, and poor public lands management to win–without, of course, realizing that these are strategies the DLC has strongly and repeatedly endorsed. But you wouldn’t know from Sirota that Schweitzer also (a) chose a Republican as running-mate, (b) endorsed a ban on gay marriage, or (c) vehemently opposed gun control in any form. I’m not approving or disapproving of these actions, but it’s pretty clear Schweitzer himself didn’t think populism made it unecessary to deal with cultural issues on their own terms.
Sirota goes on to list a lot of other red-state Democrats who have succeeded by defying the “corporate/DLC argument,” and most of them are actually politicians with long-standing close connections with the DLC: Ken and John Salazar of CO, Janet Napolitano of AZ, John Spratt of SC, Eliot Spitzer of NY, and Stephanie Herseth of SD.
But the bizarre nature of Sirota’s definition of a “progressive populist” is illustrated by his constant references to two House Members: the Socialist independent from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and the Blue Dog from Mississippi, Gene Taylor.
You don’t have to be a political whiz to know that Sanders is the at-large Congressman from Vermont, a state that gave John Kerry a 20-point win over George Bush. That state’s relevance to a discussion of “red-state and red region” Democrats is mystifying, to say the least.
As for Taylor, this “progressive populist” is a guy who (a) voted to impeach Bill Clinton, (b) voted for Bush tax cuts, and (c) has supported virtually every socially conservative piece of legislation that’s ever come to the House floor.
The only way to shoehorn Sanders and Taylor as fellow “populist progressives” is to make opposition to trade agreements the sole definition of both “populist” and “progressive,” and sometimes that seems to be the thrust of Sirota’s argument. But if that’s the case, perhaps the roughly one-third of House Republicans who routinely vote against trade agreements deserve another long look from “progressives.” And perhaps that great opponent of “corporate free trade,” Karl Rove’s idol William McKinley, was the real “populist” in his two presidential campaigns against free trader William Jennings Bryan.
In any event, if you feel compelled to read an argument for the “populism trumps culture” totem, give Sirota a pass and read Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas.” At least he’s readable and very funny.