The following article by TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore, is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:
TPM’s Brian Beutler takes a casual comment from Paul Ryan (“Do I want my budget to become the law? Yeah. If Mitt and I won, we were planning on putting it together.”) to remind us how close the United States came to heading on a very different trajectory last November.
Had Mitt Romney won with Republicans retaking control of the Senate (the two would have likely gone hand in hand), the president-elect and the congressional leadership would have turned the Ryan Budget (along with language effectively repealing Obamacare) into a front-loaded budget reconciliation bill that would have very quickly passed both Houses by a majority vote (you cannot filibuster reconciliation bills), and would have been in law by now. You know the argument House Republicans are having about whether to offer the uninsured access to crappy high-risk pools or nothing at all? That would be the argument over national policy towards the uninsured in this alternative universe. Remember the Oregon Medicaid study that got so much attention last week in connection with state decisions on expanding Medicaid? Had Republicans won the White House and the Senate last November, the same study would have likely been used to argue that states about to enjoy “flexibility” over their shiny new Medicaid Block Grants might want to consider liberating poor people from any help altogether.
It’s easy to get discouraged about gridlock and Republican obstruction and the unprogressive impulses of Democratic politicians. But we are in a vastly different and better place than we might have been at this point. Add in the likely impact on our Constitution of a President Romney sending judicial appointments to a Republican Senate, and it’s possible to manage an occasional smile.

Nate Silver takes a stab at using his quantitative analysis skills to determine what can be learned about the effect of sex scandals in yesterday’s election of Mark Sanford to rep SC-1:

It would be wrong to conclude that voters did not punish Mr. Sanford at all for his extramarital affair. In fact, a reasonable number of voters did appear to hold it against him. Last November, Mitt Romney won South Carolina’s First District by 18 percentage points. Since Mr. Romney lost the election to Barack Obama by roughly four percentage points nationwide, that means the First District is about 22 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole.
Mr. Sanford defeated his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, by nine percentage points instead – so one quick-and-dirty estimate is that Mr. Sanford’s personal history cost him a net of 13 percentage points. It just was not enough to flip the election result in such a conservative district.
As it happens, this 13-percentage-point penalty almost exactly matches an academic analysis on how much voters hold sex scandals against candidates. A 2011 paper by Nicholas Chad Long of St. Edward’s University, which examined United States senators running for re-election from 1974 to 2008, estimated that scandals involving immoral behavior lowered the share of the vote going to the incumbent by 6.5 percentage points.
Since reducing the incumbent’s vote share necessarily increases the challenger’s vote share, that means the net effect on the margin between the candidates is twice that amount, or 13 percentage points – just as we estimated it might have been for Mr. Sanford.

Silver cites other factors of unknown influence, including as Sanford’s experience edge, as a former Governor and congressman of the district, which encompasses Charleston, Myrtle Beach and most of South Carolina’s coast. Sanford’s nine point margin of victory is a disappointment, especially considering that Elizabeth Colbert Bush ran an aggressive campaign. She clearly understood that the sex scandal alone wasn’t enough to produce a victory. But perhaps she, or her supporters, could have hit a little harder on Sanford’s use of taxpayer dollars to conduct his affair.
Silver’s analysis seems reasonable enough. Most political observers are not all that surprised by Sanford’s win, since President Clinton’s popularity seemed to increase as a result of Ken Starr’s obsessive probe and Arnold Schwarzeneggar was elected governor of California amid multiple reports of marital infidelity. Still, it is interesting that sex scandals have so little impact — even in a state as archly-conservative as South Carolina.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
On CBS’s Face the Nation this week, GOP Congressman Darrel Issa held forth once again on the Obama administration’s “failures” surrounding the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya last October. Later this week his Congressional Committee will open hearings.
Other Republicans pontificated about the president’s failure to “move decisively” to intervene in the civil war in Syria.
It is increasingly clear that some in the GOP have decided to launch a frontal assault on the Obama administration’s conduct of foreign policy.
Their behavior pretty much defines the term shameless since it comes from the party whose ideologically driven agenda very recently created some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history.
Why are these attacks so brazen and outrageous?
Let’s take Issa’s revival of the Benghazi “scandal.”
The original Republican narrative about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was premised on the assumption that President Obama failed to recognize that the attack involved “terrorism.” This charge is still being made today despite the fact that the president himself — several days after the event — referred to the event as “act of terror.”
GOP critics persist in this criticism, not withstanding the fact that the issue was at the center of one of the most memorable moments in one of last year’s presidential debates when Mitt Romney made a major gaff by arguing that the president had failed to recognize the attack as “terrorism” and was then corrected by moderator Candy Crowley who pointed out that the president’s account of events was correct.
The GOP critics persist in criticizing UN Ambassador Susan Rice for delivering “talking points” on the Sunday talk shows immediately following the attack that concluded the attacks had resulted from a spontaneous demonstration rather than a planned assault. But those critics continue to ignore that at the time, that was the conclusion of the intelligence community — a conclusion that was later changed based on more complete information.
All you need to do is look at the changing contemporary accounts of the Boston Marathon bombings or the Newtown shootings to understand how first reports concerning violent events often change.
But more to the point, what benefit would the administration have gained by lying about the circumstances surrounding the events anyway?
Now Congressman Issa seems intent on arguing that the administration failed to properly secure the Benghazi compound from attack. Of course there is little question that the compound did not have enough security, since several of its occupants were killed. And there are certainly operational lessons that can be learned from these events. But the Republicans conveniently ignore that they had been the authors of cuts in the State Department’s security budget — and that the person ultimately in charge of decisions involving the diplomatic mission to Libya was the ambassador who himself was killed.
What possible reason would the Obama administration have to intentionally provide too little security to its own ambassador?
You have to assume that by continuing to pursue the Benghazi “scandal” story, the GOP is trying to imply that President Obama is “soft on terrorism,” when in fact he has done more to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist network than the neo-cons who surrounded George W. Bush could ever have dreamed — including the demise of Osama Bin Laden.
And Syria? Every day you hear some new GOP spokesman attacking the president for being “indecisive.” But as Cokie Roberts pointed out on ABC last Sunday, the moment you ask them what they propose to do, they start dancing around anything specific.

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Jonathan Bernstein’s “It’s Still About the Broken GOP” at The Washington Monthly makes the case that “gridlock is a normal part of the system,” but makes a distinction in noting that ” we have a good deal of dysfunctional gridlock in the present system.” Further, explains Bernstein:

…Dysfunctional gridlock — the kind that not only delays “common sense” solutions but also does things like leaving executive branch and judicial positions vacant, threatening to default the government of the United States, and (perhaps) encourages and then allows a party which loses an election to attempt to undermine the economy in order to secure future electoral advantage. The question is whether that sort of dysfunctional gridlock is partisan polarization or not….
…I do not believe that partisan polarization makes dysfunctional gridlock likely. It’s not partisan polarization that’s the problem; it’s the broken, radical Republican Party. Essentially, party polarization isn’t nearly as important as the array of problems within the GOP — antagonism to compromise as an organizing principle; a closed information loop dominated by the Republican-aligned press; a conservative marketplace which blunts the electoral incentive for much of the party; and loss of interest in and capacity for public policy. Without those internal dysfunctions, even an extremely conservative Republican Party would be able to cut deals and allow the political system to function relatively smoothly even with divided government; with those internal dysfunctions, the current system works poorly but any other system would be equally disastrous or worse.

Bernstein adds that the prevailing notion in the Republican party seems to be that “compromise itself is seen as a disaster.” He argues that “the system can handle polarization between two healthy political parties just fine…What’s really needed is some thought about what it would take to cure what’s broken with the GOP.” It’s a daunting challenge, as Bernstein explains:

…Some will argue that it’s a problem that’s self-correcting: a broken party will lose elections, and we do know that ideologically extreme parties tend to moderate after extended electoral loss. I worry, however, that the current GOP isn’t normal enough to follow that pattern. I worry about the conservative marketplace and the downgrading of the electoral incentive. I worry about the information loop, and the inability of even those Republicans who want to win elections to correctly diagnose what it takes to do so. I worry that those who do stay in touch with reality tend to be exiled from the party. And I worry that the electoral incentive for moderation simply isn’t great enough to overcome all of that.
Mostly, however, I worry that it’s not really just a question of ideological positioning. If Republicans really believe that compromise is evil, then it doesn’t really matter whether the ideological gap between their position and the Democratic position is narrow or wide.
…If I’m correct that the Republican Party is really broken, then “fixing” the system to allow electoral winners to get their way easily is extremely dangerous because sooner or later that broken Republican Party will win but be incapable of governing well. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Bernstein commends Ezra Klein for debunking “fairy tales about magic presidents,” which prevent progressives from effectively addressing current political realities. He argues further,

…The job of reformers is mostly about finding fixes for those institutions which have been trampled by the dysfunctional GOP, fixes which restore, in many cases, norms which worked fine but have been lost. So Senate reform should be about finding rules to restore what was good about the Senate before it became a 60-vote Senate.

As Americans become increasingly frustrated by the dysfunctional gridlock Bernstein cites, he believes that “it would be a great tragedy indeed if the strengths of the US political system are abandoned” by reckless reforms. Looking toward the 2014 mid term elections, the unusually large number of vulnerable U.S. Senate seats held by Democrats and the GOP’s 17 seat edge in the House add some resonance to Bernstein’s contention. The 60 vote requirement for a Senate majority must be changed. But the better short term priority is mobilizing our resources for a Democratic upset in 2014.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s “The Hollowing Out of Government” at HuffPo Politics calls attention to what may have been a preventable tragedy that deserved more media coverage than it got, occurring as it did in the wake of the Boston bombings. Reich brings his unique experience as an economist and advocate for American workers to bear on his post on the tragedy in West, Texas, in which 15 workers were killed and more than 200 were injured in a chemical and fertilizer plant explosion. Noting that the plant had not been fully inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) since 1985, Reich explains:

…OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of over more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers.
There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for the years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception.
In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them. That’s been the Republican strategy in general: When they can’t directly repeal laws they don’t like, they repeal them indirectly by hollowing them out — denying funds to fully implement them, and reducing funds to enforce them.

Reich explains how the Republicans have ‘hollowed out’ the enforcement capacity of the Internal Revenue Service, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and the Affordable Care Act. With respect to Obamacare, for example:

Even before the sequester, the agency was running on the same budget it had before Obamacare was enacted. Now it’s lost billions more…A new insurance marketplace specifically for small business, for example, was supposed to be up and running in January. But officials now say it won’t be available until 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as exchanges.
This is a potentially large blow to Obamacare’s political support. A major selling point for the legislation had been providing affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees.
Yes, and eroding political support is exactly what congressional Republicans want. They fear that Obamacare, once fully implemented, will be too popular to dismantle. So they’re out to delay it as long as possible while keeping up a drumbeat about its flaws.
Repealing laws by hollowing them out — failing to fund their enforcement or implementation — works because the public doesn’t know it’s happening. Enactment of a law attracts attention; de-funding it doesn’t.

It’s a pretty clever, though unconscionable strategy, designed to feed the Republican meme that government is incompetent. As Reich concludes, “If government can’t do what it’s supposed to do — keep workplaces safe, ensure that the rich pay taxes they owe, protect small investors, implement Obamacare — why give it any additional responsibility?” Reich adds, “The public doesn’t know the real reason why the government isn’t doing its job is it’s being hollowed out.”
No one should be surprised if it is revealed that the callous brutality of ‘hollowing out’ enabled the terrible tragedy in West, Texas on April 17th.

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau’s post “Leading from Below” at The Daily Beast makes a couple of important points worth sharing:

Much has been written over the last few weeks about the limits of presidential power. Some smart observers have pointed out that these limits are not new; that historically they have had less to do with the personalities of our leaders than the structure of our democracy…But how boring is that? The more exciting story to tell is how Lyndon Johnson charmed and strong-armed his way to massive legislative victories. Much less interesting is the fact that most of those victories occurred while his party held record majorities in Congress. By the end of his second term, following the loss of 47 House seats and three Senate seats, one aide joked that Johnson couldn’t even get a Mother’s Day resolution passed.
Today, a minority of senators can kill bipartisan legislation that is supported by a majority of their colleagues. And they frequently do. In the House, the speaker alone can kill bipartisan legislation that is supported by a majority of his colleagues. And he frequently does. Following some of this country’s worst mass shootings, a Republican senator and a Democratic senator with A ratings from the National Rifle Association authored a gun safety bill requiring criminal background checks that was supported by 90 percent of the American people. If I were a reporter, I’d be more interested in what was wrong with the Congress that refused to pass that bill than the man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who relentlessly campaigned for it at more than a dozen events around the country.

Favreau is equally-persuasive about what needs to be done to correct the problem:

…Since the day he announced his run for the presidency, Obama has held a deep and abiding conviction about how change really happens. Yes, it requires leaders who can inspire, and compromise, and build relationships on both sides of the aisle. But it also requires us. It requires an engaged, active citizenry, willing to pressure and push our leaders in the right direction, not just on Election Day, but every day, through emails and phone calls and office visits and town-hall meetings.
I can’t be sure, but you know what I bet will stay with Sen. Kelly Ayotte more than any charm offensive or political threat from Obama? The statement she heard from the 27-year-old daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary principal who was killed in the Newtown massacre: “You had mentioned that the burden to owners of gun stores that these expanded background checks would cause. I’m just wondering why the burden of my mother being gunned down in the hall of her elementary school isn’t as important as that.”

The progressive blogosphere has often urged the president to stand firm against compromising core Democratic values and criticized him when they feel he has caved in to the right. But FDR’s challenge, “Make me do it,” should be more rigorously applied to members of the Senate and House, as well as the president, by energetic progressive activists.

William Galston has an instructive post, “Political Paralysis Makes Us Poorer,” up at The New Republic, which discusses one of the destructive economic effects of political uncertainty. As Galston explains:

…While we always make decisions in conditions of uncertainty, there are times in which man-made surplus uncertainty further clouds the crystal ball. This matters because beyond a certain point, uncertainty can paralyze decision-making. As economists Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, and John Van Reenen recently argued, “Uncertainty can retard both investment and hiring as firms become more reluctant to make costly decisions that may soon need to be reversed. It can also lead households to adopt a more cautious stance in their spending behavior.”
Emerging evidence suggests that this mechanism is at work in the United States today. Baker, Bloom, and Davis have constructed an Index of Economic Policy Uncertainty. During most of the past five years, this index has been at or near record highs. To be sure, separating policy uncertainty from the effects of low demand poses analytical challenges. Still, Bloom and colleagues used a macro-econometric model to estimate that net of other factors, the rise in policy uncertainty since 2007 has reduced employment by more than 2 million jobs below the level it would otherwise have reached. Based on that research, the Vanguard Group recently estimated that since 2011, policy uncertainty has created a $261 billion drag on the economy, reducing real GDP growth by a full percentage point per year during that period–the equivalent of more than $800 per person.

Galston adds that “reversing decisions in response to changed circumstances can be expensive” and “uncertainty can freeze us in place” with a fear of losses and a reluctance to invest, thereby depriving the economy of potential investments that can create jobs. Galston concludes “If this is correct, the much-discussed polarization of our politics is a problem for our economy, above and beyond the effects of inadequate demand, tight credit, and slowing export growth…When the American people say–as they do in overwhelming numbers–that they want their elected officials to stop fighting one another and start fixing the problems, they’re not just asking for good government. They intuitively understand that what’s going on in Washington is bad for their incomes and job prospects as well.”
How this understanding will be translated into voting decisions will likely prove to be a pivotal factor in the outcome of the 2014 elections, and the candidates who incorporate it most effectively in their messaging should benefit accordingly.

One of America’s top conservative columnists, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, has grudgingly come to terms with the painful fact that “no politically realistic alternative” to Obamacare exists. Douthat laments the failure of Republicans to back House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s proposal to move $3.6 billion in HHS discretionary funding to pay for high risk pools. It seems the GOP’s free market purists who currently enjoy veto power within their party oppose any health care reform that implicitly recognizes the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act. Douthat elaborates:

…You can’t actually have a conservative alternative to Obamacare if you can’t recognize that “managing” the health care system requires changing the way it (already, pre-Obama!) subsidizes health care, which in turn requires increasing the subsidies available to at least some people (the sick, and Americans who don’t get insurance through their employers) even as you reduce them for others (by capping the deduction for health insurance, as a first step). It’s true that this kind of change is a “big government program” relative to the libertarian utopia, but relative to the status quo it’s nothing of the sort, and anyway I don’t see many Republican congressmen casting bold votes to actually eliminate the health-insurance tax exclusion. Instead, they’re happy to just pretend that the existing system represents some sort of free-market ideal in order to score points against the new health care law and avoid taking on any policy risk themselves — and then happy, as in this case, to demagogue as “big government” any constructive steps toward a world that’s actually more consonant with free market principles than the status quo.
This, this, is the Republican Party’s health care problem. It isn’t that conservative ideas about health policy don’t exist, and it isn’t that they won’t work. It’s that right now the feasibility question is purely academic, because even after five years of debating these issues, and despite Eric Cantor’s best efforts, there still aren’t enough Republican lawmakers willing to take even the smallest of steps toward putting those ideas to the test. This means that no matter how much of a “bureaucratic nightmare” the implementation of the current health care law turns out to be, liberals at least have this ace in the hole: When it comes to health care reform, there is still no politically realistic alternative to their approach.

Douthat is dancing around the painful fact that the GOP really has one big idea for health care reform, dog-eat-dog deregulation and elimination of all government involvement. All of the other tweaks proposed by Cantor and other Republican realists are relatively small ideas that can’t get any traction in their party, ruled as it is by ideologues.
In a system that links health security to employment, but has no serious commitment to full employment, there will always be the so-called “high-risk pools.” The purist ideologues of the GOP see this group as expendable byproducts of their social Darwinist vision. The irony is that President Obama would welcome Republican tweaks to the ACA; that was the intention from the outset — to establish a framework that could be amended over time to provide universal coverage without destroying the option of private insurance.
It’s beginning to look like the only way the ‘realists’ in the GOP will regain influence in their party is for Republicans to experience a midterm rout of historic proportions in 2014. Democrats should be eager — and ready — to oblige.

Abby Rapoport’s “Three New Facts About the Tea Party” at The American Prospect reports on the first large-scale political-science survey of Tea Party activists. The survey of more than 11,000 members of Freedom Works, the largest tea party organization, was conducted by the College of William and Mary political scientists. Among the findings:

the Tea Party activists doing work for the Republicans are surprisingly negative about the party they’re helping. While 70 percent of FreedomWorks activists identify as Republican, another 23 percent reject the Republican label entirely and instead, when asked which political party they identify with, choose “other.” Asked if they considered themselves more Republican or more a Tea Party member, more than three-quarters chose Tea Party.
…The survey asked whether they would prefer a candidate with whom they agree on most important issues but who polls far behind the probable Democratic nominee or a candidate with whom they agree “on some of the most important issues” but who’s likely to win. More than three-fourths of respondents preferred the candidate who was more likely to lose but shared their positions.
…In the YouGov survey the study uses, more than two-thirds of Tea Partiers put themselves in the two most conservative categories on economic policy, social policy, and overall policy. Only 23 percent of non-Tea Partiers place themselves in the most conservative categories on all three issues; nearly 40 percent don’t locate themselves in the most conservative categories for any of the three policy areas.

As Rappaport concludes, “Tea Party activists dominate the Republican Party, and they’re no less willing to compromise with the GOP than they are with Democrats…Simply put, the GOP is too reliant on the Tea Party–and based on these survey results, the Tea Party doesn’t care about the GOP’s fate. It cares about moving the political conversation increasingly rightward.”
All of which is good for Democrats, but horrible news for Karl Rove and other Republicans, who hope to get the GOP back on something resembling a moderate conservative track that can actually, you know, win elections

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The inside-the-beltway world of Washington, D.C. rarely deals with truly foundational economic issues. When they do, it is only because they are being forced to by crisis or a political movement forcing something onto center stage. The big fundamental issues make the powers that be uncomfortable simply because they may cause big changes that do damage to the wealthy economic incumbents who don’t want their privileged status upended. This is why D.C. seems so disconnected to people in the real world: While Congress is goofing around with stupid stuff like sequesters, the things that really matter to people go unaddressed.
Occasionally, though, the real issues are forced onto the D.C. scene by some combination of smart, gutsy politicians and political movements whose time has come. It’s too early to tell, but on what I believe are the two most central economic issues of the next generation, I’m hoping D.C. is finally going to be forced to pay attention.
The first of these issues is the steady destruction of the American middle class by the massive expansion of the low wage worker economy. There is a movement on this issue that is coming together to take this issue on, and we are seeing the early signs of it in the New York and Chicago fast food strikes, and the huge nationwide day of action at Wal-Marts around the country last year. There will be more to write about this in the coming weeks, so that will be Part 2 of this story, but you heard it here first: This will be a big deal.

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