It being April 1 and all, some might expect us here at TDS to do an April Fools’ post, oh, I dunno, maybe touting a new study that shows Republicans willing to rethink their ideology and reach out to the political center.
Unfortunately, so many contemporary headlines could be April Fools jokes, like the one reporting yet another tie election yesterday in New York. (Maybe a deal could be worked out to seat the eventual winner of this race at the same time as Al Franken finally gets to occupy the Senate seat he won last year).
In any event, our contribution to the day’s festivities is a link to a HuffPo article with some of the best April 1 hoaxes already launched this year.

At the Huffington Post, Tom Edsall has a useful article presenting the views of various prominent economists about the Geithner plan for financial institutions. He offers some snippets from the comments of those on all sides of the controversy, including Geithner critics Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffery Sachs and Henry Blodgett, and more favorably inclinded economists like Brad DeLong, Massimo Morelli and Nouriel Roubini.
Edsall’s kicker is nice:

With this range of disagreement, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU-Polytechnic Institute, wrote to the Huffington Post that the way to deal with a lack of consensus is to recognize that: “Economists always disagree … on the wrong problems.”

Ironically, the economic crisis that has ruined so many small fortunes may boost the political prospects of those with large fortunes. According to CQ’s Rachel Kapochunas, the 2010 campaign cycle could be a big year for self-funded candidates given the tough fundraising climate:

In the previous election cycle, at least 18 House and eight Senate candidates loaned their campaigns more than $1 million in personal funds, according to CQ Moneyline.
Another 60 candidates loaned their campaigns $350,000 or more. In addition, numerous self-funding candidates identified their personal funds as contributions instead of loans to be repaid.
But the previous election cycle includes a time during which the forecast for the country’s economic health was less dire than today’s widespread predictions.
Jennifer A. Steen, author of author of “Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections,” said future economic conditions may strongly impact the coming election season.
“People’s willingness to spend money on political activity … is probably going to taper off this year,” Steen said. “I think it should be harder for most candidates to raise money and that makes the relative value of self-financing go up.”

As Kapochunas notes, self-funded candidates don’t actually have that great a track record for winning, but the two parties love them for what they don’t ask from the national fundraising networks. Indeed, self-funders are the ideal candidates to recruit in tough districts: they force the opposition to spend money better spent elsewhere, and they allow the party to target its own resources to the closest races.
Nothing like a fool and his (or her) money to change the odds in a competitive political environment!

Jonathan Martin of Politico offers a good discussion today of President Obama’s media strategy, and specifically his and his staff’s efforts to bypass the White House Press Corps and communicate directly with particular constituencies and with people who derive news and views from nontraditional sources.
“Bypassing the filters,” of course, was a hallmark of Obama’s presidential campaign, which often found ways to bypass would-be gatekeepers of information and opinion, from the mainstream media to bloggers to interest-group chieftains.
But now that he’s in power, Obama’s approach to media has become much more comprehensive:

Unlike some of his predecessors, however, Obama and his aides tend not to boast about their media strategy or publicly exalt in how they are confronting or marginalizing the traditional news media.
To the contrary, Obama has continued to engage aggressively with the establishment outlets. The New York Times recently had an interview, and CBS News’ “60 Minutes” has conducted two long interviews with Obama since Election Day.
These sessions reflect Obama’s belief, according to aides, that in a fragmented media universe, presidents must communicate nearly constantly across an array of platforms, both traditional and new.
“You’ve got lots of people that aren’t cable junkies or news junkies,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, explaining the thinking behind the tailored media strategy. “This gives us the opportunity to reach a little bit different of a segment.”
Another top aide used a sports analogy for the comprehensive strategy: “Flood the zone.”

As recent developments have shown, Obama needs all the help he can get in communicating his message and agenda to a worried and skeptical America.

Over at RealClearPolitics, you can find a valuable exchange between RCP’s Jay Cost and TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira over the latter’s “New Progressive Majority” study published recently by the Center for American Progress.
A few days ago, Cost questioned Texeira’s confidence that the demographic trends he documented in the study represented a reliable indicator of future presidential election cycles, suggesting that short-term factors including campaign dynamics are often crucial variables. Texeira’s response notes that he’s dealing in trends and probabilities, not predictions or certainties, and makes this point about perennial “short-term factors” dismissals of electoral results:

Of course, there are some–Cost appears to be one–who argue that all elections are not much more than short-term forces and that’s all you need to look at. By that logic, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was all about short-term discontent with Carter and the economy and the shifting patterns of support compared to twenty years previously were not of much significance. But that wasn’t true then and I suspect the argument that Obama’s victory was all short-term forces will also turn out to be incorrect.

In a wrap-up post, Cost partially concedes some of Teixeira’s arguments, but notes the strong belief of Republicans as recently as four years ago that trends were moving permanently in their direction.
The whole exchange is worth reading. But while Jay Cost raised some good questions about the implications that some Democrats might draw from Teixeira’s study, he didn’t lay a glove on Ruy when it came to the data.

The most amusing story out there today is provided by Politico‘s Manu Raju, who’s been trying to push Republican Member of Congress to take a position on a proposed surtax for those receiving bonuses from AIG. Here’s the money quote:

They wouldn’t mind letting the bonus issue linger for a while, and they’re wary of either signing on to the plan — and with it, a tax increase — or resisting it, and thereby risking being seen as insufficiently tough on AIG and its employees

Could be that GOP Congressmen are waiting for Grover Norquist to make up his mind how he feels about an AIG bonus tax:

Thirty-four senators and 172 House members signed a pledge with the Americans for Tax Reform saying they would not vote to raise taxes. The group is still evaluating the legislation and has not determined yet whether a vote for the plan would violate the pledge.

Republicans hope Grover’s staff gets a move on. The House is likely to vote on an AIG bonus surtax this very day, and while GOPers would prefer to be watching NCAA tournament basketball, they’re going to have to go on the record as to whether their fear of voter wrath or their hatred of government is greater.

As Washington gears up for an apocalyptic battle over President Obama’s budget proposals, the issue that most looms over that battle is the administration’s decision to fold two large policy initiatives into the process–health care reform and climate change.
When it comes to health care, we now are in a position to know a lot more about how that decision was made, thanks to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic. He has an article out today that explains the internal debate in the transition team and then in the White House over the timing of health care reform and its connection with the president’s first budget. Most interesting in this story is Obama’s own crucial role, particularly during the key juncture when would-be HHS Secretary Tom Daschle was first distracted and then sidelines by controversy over unpaid taxes:

[H]ealth care, in the end, might have gotten pushed aside–except that one very senior official in the administration kept insisting that it stay on the agenda. That official was Obama himself.

Another fateful decision–the extent to which the administration would offer a highly prescriptive and comprehensive reform plan, or leave significant wiggle-room for Congress–was also made personally by the president, who had to choose between larger and smaller budget proposals for health care:

Rejecting the $1 trillion proposal, because the offsets it required seemed too severe, Obama went with the $600 billion option–$634 billion, to be precise. The sum wasn’t enough to finance universal coverage; an actual package could cost $1 trillion, if not more, according to many estimates. But Obama decided simply to note that fact and promise to work with Congress on finding the extra money–in a nod to the fiscal concerns of Orszag and Summers. Strategically speaking, this approach was consistent with the widely accepted lesson of the health care battle of 1994–that the Clinton White House should have let Congress take more ownership over the process.

It’s obviously too early to judge how well these decisions play out. But Cohn’s account helps illustrate how thoroughly they were discussed, and makes it clear that Obama :can bring his advisers to him–rather than the other way around.”

After a barrage of big business advertising, and some criticism of the legislation from a couple of Blue Dog Democrats, one might expect that prospects for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. “card-check”) any time soon would be dim. But it’s not quite so simple as that.
As Jeanne Cummings explains at Politico today, the business community may have overplayed its hand on EFCA, particularly by focusing its campaign on provisions of EFCA that could change in a labor-backed compromise proposal. Anticipating this change of dynamics, business lobbyists are already beginning to shift their arguments against EFCA from the “don’t abolish the secret ballot!” line to one that simply suggests that the economy can’t tolerate an increase in unionization.
Meanwhile, Gallup has a new poll out showing that EFCA is favored by 53% of Americans, with 39% opposing it. Follow-up questions indicate that the respondents who are most closely following the “debate” over EFCA tend to tilt in a negative direction, but since much of the public “debate” has consisted of anti-EFCA ads focusing on the “secret ballot” issue, that’s not suprising. And more importantly, if the anti-EFCA talking points continue to shift towards generic “unions are bad” rhetoric, opinion on EFCA is likely to begin polarizing on that much more general topic.

In a useful article for The American Prospect, Matt Yglesias draws attention to a basic disconnect between U.S. and Israeli thinkers and doers that has often been obscured by internal differences in both countries:

Differing coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Israel on Tuesday captured the divergence of opinion. The Associated Press’ headline kept the focus on Clinton’s somewhat news-making proclamation about Palestine: “US: ‘Inescapable’ movement to Palestinian state.” The story highlighted how Clinton emphasized to Israeli leaders across the spectrum — including Benjamin Netanhayu, almost certainly Israel’s next prime minister and an opponent of a sovereign Palestine — the vital need to continue work toward a two-state solution.
The Jerusalem Post headline, by contrast, was “Netanyahu, Barak urge Clinton for Iran dialogue deadline.” Israeli leaders, from the Labor Party to the Likud Party, think that the most important thing they can be doing right now is urging the United States to get tough on Iran. The March 3 Haaretz had an article about Israeli leaders intending to present Clinton with “red lines” on talks with Iran.
How the client state in this relationship got in the position to start dictating red lines is an issue I’ll leave for others. The larger issue is that this Israeli consensus on priorities is dangerously out of line with reality.

You should go on to read the full article for Yglesias’ arguments about why he thinks the Israeli perspective is “out of line with reality,” mostly having to do with his fear that a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine may soon no longer be an option. But any way you look at it, he’s absolutely right that Americans assume the Palestinian issue is always front-and-center for Israelis, while Israelis increasingly perceive Palestinians as pawns in a bigger geopolitical struggle with Iran. The disconnect here is pervasive, and dangerous.

Sarah Posner at The American Prospect‘s FundamentaList offers up this fine quote from U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), delivered at the Conservative Political Action Committee confab last week:

A nation that raises its children in government schools cannot expect its people to stand for the principles of freedom.

Without question, DeMint seems to be in a strange competition with Gov. Mark Sanford to become the contemporary standard-bearer for the Palmetto State’s rich tradition of right-wing extremism. But the habit of invidiously referring to public schools as “government schools” is one that has in the past been largely limited to the more exotic precincts of libertarians and home-school activists. There is something a bit refreshing about a Republican who frontally attacks public education instead of pretending to cherish it while undermining it through chronic underfunding or vouchers. Still, Americans probably aren’t quite ready to be lashed by any politician for their effete, socialist willingness tolerate Big Government involvement in the education of their children.