At Open Left, Chris Bowers calls attention to a nifty chart put together by SwingStateProject’s DavidNYC that lists every 2010 House incumbent who has failed to receive over 70% in a primary.
As Chris notes, Republicans are much more likely to have attracted ideologically-motivated primary challenges–about twice as likely, actually–despite the relatively high level of ideological cohesion among House Republicans. In fact, looking at David’s chart, support for TARP seems to be the most common reason that a Republican House member received a viable primary challenge.
Outside the one or two hot-buttons motivating the Tea Party movement, Republicans don’t really have that many issues wiith each other, now that they’ve all agreed that Ronald Reagan is the truth and light on all issues, and that the only deadly sin is to even think about raising taxes. But if any GOPer forgets these guiding principles–or in many parts of the country, takes anything less than full-on Christian Right positions on abortion or same-sex marriage–a primary challenge is right around the corner.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
As several recent surveys make clear, concern about deficits and debt is rising sharply. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey conducted in early May showed that the share of individuals rating “the deficit and government spending” as the top priority for the federal government to address has jumped since January from 13 to 20 percent–second only to job creation and economic growth. According to Gallup, “federal government debt” now ties with terrorism for the top spot in perceived threats to our future well-being. It is entirely possible that we are reaching an inflection point in public attitudes that will force the political system to change course.
Indeed, as Janet Hook shows in a well-reported piece in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, concerns about the deficit are already forcing congressional Democrats to scale back ambitious plans for continuing stimulus. Hook quotes Mark Mellman, a pollster who has long worked with Democrats, as saying that “there’s no question that people are almost as concerned about the deficit and government spending as about jobs. It is not just about the actual dollars–it is a metaphor for wasted money and lack of discipline and long-term economic decline.” A near-identical complex of concerns created an opening for a third-party presidential movement that garnered 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and strengthened the case for the policy of fiscal restraint Bill Clinton adopted in 1993.
All of this raises the question of whether public sentiment coincides with sound economics. A pretty good case can be made that it did in the 1990s, although it’s also possible to argue that the U.S. economy got a special boost during that decade from information technology and the winding-down of the Cold War. Today, many economists fear that we may be headed for a replay of Japan’s “lost decade” of slow growth, which in our case would condemn us to historically high levels of long-term unemployment.
That raises another question: What can the United States learn from the Japanese experience that should shape our own policy choices during this decade? This is more than an academic question, and the discussion cannot be confined to professional economists. After all, how to deal effectively with the twin challenges of economic growth and fiscal sustainability will be this decade’s dominant domestic policy debate.
It was in that context that I waded (some would say blundered) into a public colloquy with Paul Krugman and his legions of supporters. In the process, I discovered that Japan’s lost decade is surprisingly difficult to decode and that much of the data doesn’t mean what it appears to. Because Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics seems to be the generally acknowledged guru of Japanese economics studies, I turned to a lecture he delivered at LSE last month. Posen argues that when the Japanese employed traditional Keynesian stimulus, it worked in the ways that conventional theory would predict and that the recovery faltered when the government unwisely pulled back from stimulative policies. (In that respect, Japanese policies in the late 1990s were akin to FDR’s turn toward restraint after 1936, which halted the recovery and renewed the decline.) Posen sums up as follows:

Note, however, that this assessment is not a blank check for unlimited fiscal stimulus at every time, everywhere. Japan in the 1990s was where fiscal activism should have worked the best, being closed, with passive highly home-biased savers, and a large economy with essentially no foreign indebtedness. Having a low government share in GDP and a low tax base also means the distortions incurred by sustained fiscal expansions are of relatively low cost. Looking at today’s world, only the U.S. shares these attributes with Japan, and can thus afford to engage in ongoing fiscal stimulus in a protracted recession–and the lesser passivity of U.S. savers and increasing American foreign indebtedness suggest some limit will be reached. [Italics mine]

In short, the United States can go down Japan’s road, but not as far. In that respect, the U.S. stands between Japan and the UK, whose economy is far less closed than Japan’s and whose public sector is much larger. (To judge from the important speech Prime Minister David Cameron gave on June 7, he agrees with Posen’s assessment and has decided to attack public spending frontally.)
To get a better handle on how far the U.S. can venture down the road of sustained fiscal stimulus, I turned next to an important survey, “Activist Fiscal Policy to Stabilize Economic Activity,” written by two macroeconomists, Berkeley’s Alan J. Auerbach and my Brookings colleague William Gale. In a key section of their paper, titled “Short-Term Stimulus with Long-Term Deficits,” they state that “there are many reasons to think fiscal policies would have different effects if they are adopted during a period of fiscal stress than they would otherwise. … [F]iscal consolidations have less contractionary effects when adopted under fiscal stress, as measured by high debt and projected government spending relative to GDP.”
In plain English: the higher spending and public debt go, the stronger the economic case for fiscal restraint. At some point, serious deficit reduction ceases to be a green eye-shade exercise and becomes essential for sustainable economic growth. But when? After summarizing the grim prognosis for U.S. deficits and debt during this decade and beyond, Auerbach and Gale formulate the choice as follows:

[P]olicy makers will need to decide when to cut off stimulus and start imposing fiscal discipline. Cutting off stimulus too soon could plunge the economy into a new downturn, as happened to the United States in 1937 and Japan in 1997. Letting stimulus run for too long could ignite investors’ fears and create a ‘hard landing’ scenario.

In retrospect, Keynesians agree that U.S. and Japanese policymakers underprovided fiscal stimulus, given the length and severity of the crises they faced. If we were sure that we are now up against a comparable crisis, then the case for continued stimulus would be compelling. But the problem is that we aren’t sure, and we do know that as public spending and deficits continue to rise, the risks that come with excessive debt accumulation increase significantly.

Read more…

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission gets set to convene, the Greek budget disaster has triggered the predictable flood of cautionary notes about how we’re spending too much and heading toward a debt crisis. Should these concerns illuminate the commission’s work–or are they merely alarmist?
Paul Krugman harbors no doubts: “Despite a chorus of voices claiming otherwise,” he writes, “we aren’t Greece.” But that’s not as encouraging as it sounds, he adds: “We are however, looking more and more like Japan. … [Recent data] suggest that we may be heading for a Japan-style lost decade, trapped in a prolonged period of high unemployment and slow growth.”
This diagnosis of our economic disease has implications for the policy prescription, Krugman argues. “For the past few months, much commentary on the economy … has had one central theme: policy makers are doing too much. Governments need to stop spending, we’re told. … Meanwhile, there are continual warnings that inflation is just around the corner and that the Fed needs to pull back from its efforts to support the economy.”
Krugman will have none of this: “[T]the truth is that policy makers aren’t doing too much; they’re doing too little.” We should enact another stimulus plan, and administration officials would push for one if Congress had not been “spooked by the deficit hawks.” For its part, he adds, the Fed should abandon its groundless fears of inflation and work instead to ward off the threat of deflation–the true cause of Japan’s failure to regain economic vitality.
So is Japan really a better baseline for U.S. policymakers than Greece, and is it close enough to serve as a guide for policy? To be sure, there are some important resemblances. Like the U.S., Japan experienced a sharp run-up in equity and real estate, followed by a collapse. As in the U.S., this reverse weakened the banking system and coincided with a sharp contraction in commercial lending. Like their American counterparts, Japanese policymakers responded with substantial fiscal and monetary stimulus.
These are qualitative similarities. But there are quantitative differences, and they are large enough to warrant caution about direct policy inferences. Stocks in the U.S. are down about 40 percent from their all-time high, versus 75 percent for Japan. While U.S. real estate is down about 30 percent from its peak, Japanese land values are down more than 80 percent. In Tokyo, residential real estate has fallen by more than 90 percent, and commercial real estate in the heart of the financial district sells for 1 percent of its 1989 value. Brookings economist and former CEA director Barry Bosworth estimates that as a share of GDP, the destruction of wealth in Japan from peak to trough was about five times what it has been in the United States. Given the key role of stocks as well as real estate loans in the balance sheets of Japanese banks, it’s reasonable to assume that the Japanese banking system experienced a disruption far worse than ours.
It would stand to reason, then, that restoring Japan’s economy to health would require an even larger policy response than the one we’ve seen in the United States thus far. In some respects, that is what happened. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked.

Read more…

Conservatives have been working overtime to convince Americans that the Gulf oil spill crisis is “Obama’s Katrina,” on the apparent theory that it’s a symbol of administration fecklessness on the order of Bush’s initial immobility during the destruction of New Orleans and the death of many of its citizens. Now blame-shifting for the disaster is entirely understandable coming from the “drill baby drill” crowd, one of whose heroes, Dick Cheney, probably contributed a lot more to the Gulf disaster than anyone currently on the public payroll.
But putting aside the injustice of blaming Obama for the spill or efforts to mitigate the damage, is it true that the “Katrina” label is politically as well as morally deadly?
Interestingly enough, Alan Abramowitz has taken a look back at the actual effect of the Katrina disaster on George W. Bush’s approval ratings, and finds that it was minimal:

President Bush’s average approval rating was 44 percent in August [of 2005], before Katrina, and 44 percent again in September, after Katrina. Moreover, the rate of decline in the months following Katrina appears very similar to the rate of decline in the months before Katrina.

This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On some level, we all know that times are really tough for the millions of people the Great Recession threw out of work–and for the millions of others who are looking for their first job. Many of us have read that long-term unemployment (26 weeks or more) is at a record high. But sometimes it takes a new angle of vision to make you see just how difficult things are. My “aha” moment came over the weekend, when I read a recent survey that tracked the fate of a large sample of individuals who were unemployed as of last August. Here a summary:
Of the 908-person sample, 67 percent remained unemployed but were still looking for work, and an additional 12 percent had given up and dropped out of the labor force. Only 21 percent had found jobs (only 13 percent full-time) and were currently employed. A stunning 28 percent of the newly reemployed had been looking for work for more than one year, and 6 percent for more than two years. Fifty-five percent accepted a pay cut in their new jobs; 13 percent took a cut larger than one-third of their previous salary.
Women (26 percent newly employed) did somewhat better than men (18 percent). Surprisingly, young adults (29 percent newly employed) did better than 30 to 49-year olds (21 percent). Not surprisingly, this is a terrible time to be over 50 and out of work: Only 12 percent of these older workers had managed to find jobs.
Blacks or Hispanics (22 percent newly employed) got jobs at a similar clip to whites (21 percent). Education and income mattered, but not as much as one might expect. Individuals with some college training were no more successful than those with a high school diploma or less, and only 28 percent of college graduates who were unemployed last August had found work in the interim. And while only 19 percent of those making less than $30,000 were newly employed, the numbers weren’t much better for those making $30-60,000 (22 percent) or $60,000 and over (26 percent).
In short, there has been no place to hide from the Great Recession, and the traditional formula–get a good education and be persistent–is not reliably producing the right outcomes. The American people know that something out of the ordinary is taking place: 63 percent believe that the economy is undergoing “fundamental and lasting changes,” versus only 37 percent who think it is experiencing a temporary downturn. This shift has consequences that go well beyond the economic. For many Americans, the old verities have been cast aside, with nothing to take their place. As far as they can see, they’ve done everything right, but their expectations have been upended and their life-plans disrupted. In these circumstances, people are bound to think that the country is on the wrong path, and they are bound to feel a combination of confusion and anger toward a political system that they see as having let them down.
President Obama has pledged to rebuild the U.S. economy on a new and more solid foundation. That’s vital. But so is restoring the belief that there is some relation between effort and reward. If the old rules are obsolete, we not only need new rules–a 21st century unemployment insurance system, say, or infrastructure investment and employment, or hours-reductions and job-sharing as an alternative to outright job loss–but also a political system that is prepared to back them up. It’s hard to see how we can make the hard choices needed to build our future unless ordinary Americans come once more to believe that there’s something in it for them.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Conventional wisdom: it is a fickle, fickle thing. The latest example of the incredible lightness of opinion in today’s media and political climate is the reaction to the results of the race in Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district. Politicians and pundits, right- as well as left-leaning, are taking it as evidence that Republican hopes of retaking the House this November are too optimistic. That may turn out to be the case, but PA-12 is hardly enough evidence to warrant the conclusion.
First, let’s place that district in context. Yes, it was one of Obama’s ten worst Appalachian congressional district’s during his 2008 primary contest with Hillary Clinton. But it was his best of those ten, by far, during the general election (he got 49 percent of the vote), and it was the only one of the ten that John Kerry carried in 2004. The reason: its party registration is so overwhelmingly Democratic that even when lots of conservative Democrats peel off, a majority or near-majority remains for the party’s nominee. So while the Republicans may have believed their own hype in the run-up to this week’s special election, PA-12 was always going to be tough for them.
Now let’s look at three Gallup surveys released within the past week. One notes that so far in 2010, only 23 percent of Americans have been satisfied with the way things are going–well below the 40 percent average of the past three decades, and the lowest reading recorded in a mid-term election year going back to 1982. A second survey observes that the two political parties have been at or near parity among registered voters since January in the generic congressional ballot. This is especially significant because (as the survey shows) “the structure of voting preferences seen in the first three months of the [election] year generally carried through to the end.” And parity among registered voters would be bad news for Democrats: on average, Republicans have enjoyed about a five-point turnout edge in midterm elections.
The third survey underscores this point. It highlights a 19-point gap between conservatives and liberals in their enthusiasm about voting in this year’s midterm elections. And 62 percent of those who describe themselves as “very conservative” (10 percent of registered voters) say that they are very enthusiastic, versus only 44 percent of those who term themselves “very liberal” (a scant 4 percent of registered voters).
Connect the dots and we have the portrait of an electorate that’s highly dissatisfied with the status quo and that seems poised to give more votes in the aggregate to Republican than to Democratic candidates this fall. I don’t know how many House seats that translates into, but I’d be surprised if the number didn’t start with a “3” (at least). As far as I can see, only a big change in the economy–a significant increase in the rate of GDP growth leading to a noticeable reduction in top-line unemployment numbers and a bump up in real disposable income for those who have jobs–would be enough to change the overall outlook for November.

The Senate today invoked cloture on the financial regulations bill, with three Republicans–Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and–yes-Scott Brown–joining 57 Democrats in favor. Russ Feingold and Maria Cantwell, who wanted to make changes in the bill, voted “no.”
This clears the decks for final passage, and then a complex House-Senate conference to resolve differences in this bill and the one passed by the House in December, which seems like many years ago.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I believe in comprehensive immigration reform—so much so that I helped organize a bipartisan task force on the matter. (Here is the report.) I understand that most Americans have qualms about taking harshly punitive measures against illegal immigrants. And there is little doubt that a party seen as anti-immigrant will eventually lose the support of an increasingly diverse population, and especially of young people, as the fate of the post-Pete Wilson Republican Party in California demonstrates.
But I still have no idea why some leading Democrats, such as Chuck Schumer, think that pushing this issue right now will be helpful in November. If they believe that recent events in Arizona have created a public groundswell for a more liberal response, they’re just wrong. Let’s look at four high-quality national surveys conducted this month.
According to a CBS/New York Times poll, 65 percent of Americans see illegal immigration as a “very serious problem,” 74 percent think it weakens the economy, and 78 percent believe the U.S. should be doing more to stop it. These beliefs help explain why 51 percent of the people think that the new Arizona law is “about right,” versus only 36 percent who say it “goes too far.” They reach this conclusion despite the fact that 72 percent think it will have disproportionate effects on certain racial and ethnic groups and 78 percent believe it will burden police departments. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds the same thing: 64 percent of respondents support the Arizona legislation (46 percent strongly) despite the fact that 66 percent believe that it will lead to discrimination against Latino immigrants who are in this country legally.
The Pew Research Center probed more deeply and came to a similar conclusion. Its researchers began by examining public opinion on three key provisions of the Arizona law: requiring people to produce documents verifying legal status (73 percent approval); allowing the police to detain anyone unable to verify legal status (67 percent approval); and giving authorities the right to question anyone they think may be in the country illegally (62 percent approval). Pew then asked whether, “considering everything,” respondents endorsed the Arizona bill: 59 percent said yes, versus only 32 percent who disapproved.
Pew breaks down its results by subgroup. While the results for Republicans and independents are predictable, those for Democrats aren’t. Sixty-five percent of Democrats support requiring people to produce documents, 55 percent would allow detention of non-verifiers, and 50 percent would allow questioning based on police suspicion only. Accordingly, Democrats are split down the middle on the Arizona law: 45 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed. Notably, Pew finds somewhat more Democratic support than do the other surveys, suggesting that additional information about the Arizona law tends to move Democrats toward it rather than away from it.
For its part, a series of Gallup surveys also underscores the public’s concerns with immigration. A majority believes that we should emphasize better border-control, and 51 percent of Americans who have heard about the Arizona law support it as opposed to 39 percent who don’t.
This does not mean that the United States as a whole is on the verge of a new era of nativism. Each survey identifies reservoirs of sympathy for immigrants, illegal as well as legal. But when Americans strike an overall balance, their concern about the social and economic consequences of the current situation outweighs their worries about the humanitarian consequences of changing it. That is why Gallup concludes one of its surveys as follows: “Recent Gallup polling found nearly as many Americans rating immigration reform as an important national priority as said this about financial reform for Wall Street. That aligns with the wishes of some Senate Democrats who are reportedly pressing for quick action on comprehensive immigration reform.” However, continues the Gallup report, “Public opinion on the issue might not align as well with the policies these Democrats have in mind.” Based on the evidence I’ve cited from four respected survey organizations, it’s hard to disagree.
Democrats who favor proceeding with this issue have two remaining arguments. They claim that, win or lose, pushing hard on an immigration bill would mobilize parts of the party’s base and produce net gains for Democratic candidates in key districts and states. Given the fact that at least nine out of ten voters this November will be non-Latinos and that most contests involving high percentages of Latino voters are likely to remain safely in the Democratic column anyway, this claim is intuitively hard to believe. At any rate, the burden of proof is on its proponents.
Second, one may argue that all of this is irrelevant: the Arizona law is an unconscionable assault on the civil rights of immigrants who are here legally and on the human rights of those who aren’t. The soul of the Democratic Party is at stake, and shrinking from the fight would be a disgrace. Maybe so. But no one should believe that virtue will be its own reward—certainly not between now and November.

Last week I did a post asking if it was actually possible that California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who’s on course to break every national record for spending in a state political race, could actually lose her primary. Now one of the more respected California polling outfits has weighed in, and yes, Whitman’s in some trouble, though still ahead.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, Whitman’s 61-11 lead over Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner in March has dropped to 38-29, with the undecided vote actually going up to 31%. With less than three weeks left to go until the June 8 primary, Whitman’s spending total for the cycle is now up to $68 million (!), and Poizner’s dropped $24 million himself in a much shorter period of time. It is very, very difficult to watch television in California right now without heavy exposure to constant back-and-forth attack ads from these two candidates.
I’ve written the contest up over at FiveThirtyEight for anyone who’s interested. The bottom line is that the Whitman-Poizner battle is good news for Democratic candidate Jerry Brown, and if Poizner’s immigrant-bashing message prevails or forces Whitman to emulate it, it could have long-term repercussions for party politics in the Golden State.

In response to the Washington Post’s long pattern of “plague on both sides” editorial bewailing of partisanship and polarization, TDS Co-Editor William Galston and his Brookings Institution colleague Thomas Mann penned an op-ed in that paper which aims to set the record straight.
While they share the Post’s unhappiness with the consequences for governing of polarization, Galston and Mann also insist that its “asymmetrical” nature be acknowledged:

Put simply: More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal. It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. George W. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama’s health-reform legislation. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans.

Thus, say Galston and Mann, grassroots conservatives are not only supporting but demanding the Republican congressional leadership’s obstructionism in a way that makes negotiations by Democrats largely a waste of time, and forces not just counter-polarization but difficult differences of opinion among Democrats. In a very real sense, governing has become an internal process of the Democratic Party as Republicans simply stand for opposition and obstruction:

[A] Republican Party dominated at the grass roots by angry rejection of all bipartisanship — and of all but the most limited government — may win support in the short term, but it will be hard put to cooperate productively in the serious tasks of governance.