TDS has been following the race for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee as offering important insights into the conservative zeitgeist these days, with its steadfast and increasingly strident claims that there’s nothing wrong with the GOP that an ideological turn to the Right can’t solve.
As the RNC vote draws nigh (it is scheduled to occur on Saturday), the zaniness is getting even more intense. Check out this exerpt from a WaPo analysis by Perry Bacon, Jr., on the state of the chairmanship contest:

Party activists coming to Washington say they will focus on restoring what they describe as the GOP’s core principles. Even many of Duncan’s backers support the anti-bailout resolution, which could be before the full RNC tomorrow.
“People in this country are more conservative than what has been shown,” said Cathie Adams, an RNC member from Texas. “Republicans have lost because we were playing the me-too game of growing government.”
RNC members, who include three representatives from each state, frequently criticize Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” particularly his efforts to make it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens. And while usually not naming Bush, all six RNC candidates have also emphasized the need for Republicans to push for lower federal spending. [Ken] Blackwell has been the most explicit, likening Bush to former president Herbert Hoover for advocating policies that increased the size of government.

As Bacon’s full story richly documents, the GOP’s “core principles” now seem to include a semi-universal view condemning not only the Bush-led autumn financial bailout, but “compassionate conservatism,” the stimulus package, and anything other than an actual reduction in the size of the federal government. But leave it to Ken Blackwell to refute charges of Republican “neo-Hooverism” by attacking the memory of Herbert Hoover as a guy that caved in to the godless liberals of his day and failed to honor Republican “core principles.” By all accounts, Blackwell is unlikely to win the RNC chairmanship, but he may well best represent the ideological dispositions of latter-day conservatism.

There’s no question that the single most dramatic step taken by Barack Obama since his inauguration on Tuesday was the series of executive orders banning use of torture by federal agencies (including the CIA), eliminating the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and setting into motion the eliimination of the Gitmo prison and the legal limbo it represents.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a good summary of the orders at Newsweek, along with an account of the internal debate that led up to it. And Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic explains some of the “hard cases”–particularly Yemeni and Chinese prisoners–that will complicate the closure of Gitmo.
If you actually want to read the four executive orders involved, Salon has usefully posted them here.

It’s always interesting when, oh, a billion or so people watch or listen to a speech and come away with very different impressions. From the published reviews of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, that may have been the case yesterday.
One of the more positive takes was by John Heilemann of New York magazine, who thought the speech demonstrated Obama’s “strategic mastery.” John Judis of The New Republic, on the other hand, was disappointed, calling the speech “a hodgepodge of themes, injunctions and applause lines.” At the same site, Noam Scheiber thought the speech was actually quite coherent thematically, but stylistically uneven, ranging from high rhetoric to wonkery.
Virtually everyone thought the speech’s somber tone was appropriate, albeit a contrast to the upbeat Obama speeches everyone remembers from the campaign.
The one big negative to the Inaugural (perhaps inevitable in a highly secured event for 2 million people) according to many accounts was a serious logisitcal snafu that kept thousands of ticketed guests from getting anywhere near to the event. If you want to read an especially unhappy account of that problem, Greg Levine of Firedoglake has served one up.

In case you are wondering, this is the timetable set out by the Washington Post for today’s inaugural festivities:
4 a.m. — Metro opens (at rush-hour service and fare levels).
4 a.m. — Monday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends; they can remain open 24 hours through Jan. 21.
8 a.m. — Security gates open for ticketed guests
9 a.m. — Ceremony gates open.
10 a.m. — Musical prelude. See the full schedule.
Noon — Ceremony ends, followed by the inaugural address, luncheon, departure of President Bush and parade.
2 p.m. — Approximate start time for parade
7 p.m. — Official balls start
9 p.m. — Rush-hour Metro service levels end.
2 a.m. — Metro closes.
4 a.m. — Tuesday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends.
In other words, there will be a lot of public transporation provided and hooching allowed, and that’s a good combination.

Note: this is a special guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. We hope to hear from other Democrats offering varying views on the political and policy strategy challenges facing the Obama administration.
We’ll find out soon enough whether President-elect Obama is as adept at governing as he is at campaigning. But this much is already certain: Barack Obama has presided over a spectacular presidential transition – maybe the best in modern times.
In picking a crew of political heavyweights to run his administration, Obama has radiated both self-confidence and seriousness about governing. And in recent weeks, he has crystallized the key dilemmas facing the country with greater candor and specificity than ever before.
Yesterday, for example, the President-elect promised to reform Medicare and Social Security. “This, by the way is where there are going to be very difficult choices and issues of sacrifice and responsibility and duty,” Obama told The Washington Post. “You have to have a president who is willing to spend some political capital on this. And I intend to spend some.”
Now that’s audacity. Despite some vague rhetorical gestures toward social security reform during the campaign, Obama gave little reason to believe he would give high priority to modernizing America’s mammoth social insurance programs. This might strike some as nothing more than a bow to fiscal reality, but it’s a reality that many in his party have had a hard time accepting.
Looking back ruefully on his White House tenure, President Bush has conceded that his 2005 push to “reform” Social Security was a miserable flop. The public’s negative verdict, however, had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the “just say no” reflex that grips many liberals when the subject of entitlement reform comes up.
But Obama, like President Clinton before him, knows that the unsustainable growth of retirement and especially health care costs, poses a threat not only to America’s fiscal health, but also to progressive government itself. Already, the big entitlements consume more than half the federal budget. If unchecked, their automatic spending growth will squeeze out space for public investments in health care, education, childrens’ well-being, public safety and everything else progressives care about.
As Obama told the Post, social security is, relatively speaking, the easy fix. Its funding gap is modest (“only” around $4.3 trillion, according to the Social Security trustees) compared to Medicare’s (an estimated $36 trillion). The menu of options for closing that gap while at the same time strengthening Social Security’s ability to lift seniors out of poverty are well known.
Obama, for instance, has called for raising the cap on salary subjected to the social security payroll tax. But rebalancing the generational compact embedded in social security will also require action on the benefit side of the equation. The best approach, developed by Bob Pozen, is the “progressive indexing” of social security benefits. It would trim benefits only for well-off retirees who are less reliant on Social Security than middle- and low-income people. The proposal is detailed in Memos to the New President, a “big idea” book the Progressive Policy Institute released this week.
While social security essentially presents a demographic challenge – fewer workers supporting a rapid expansion of the nation’s elderly population – fixing Medicare is a more complicated matter. In addition to the worsening “dependency ratio” as the baby boomers flood into retirement, the costs of medical services themselves are growing much faster than the economy. Unless the Obama Administration can find ways to reduce the rate of health care cost growth, even as it expands coverage to the uninsured, the United States is headed toward a fiscal trainwreck.
Obama also announced his intention to hold a fiscal responsibility summit. He clearly recognizes that America’s faces a dual economic crisis. Our immediate challenge is to get credit markets working again, and stimulate the economy to reduce the severity and duration of today’s recession. The long-term challenge is to impose discipline on the federal budget, so that America’s burgeoning debts won’t undercut our future growth or shrink our childrens’ economic prospects.
Striking the right balance between the short- and long-term needs of the country will be the central drama of the Obama administration. It will require the President to pursue ostensibly contradictory policies over the next four years: first, a spending surge, then, as the economy starts to recover, a smart pirouette toward fiscal restraint. It will be a tricky maneuver and will require consummate political skill. Obama’s full-throated embrace of fiscal realism suggests he is up to the task.

In case you’ve been waiting with bated breath, administration and congressional officials have largely finished up work on the economic stimulus package that will now wend its way through the legislative process. There will be slight differences between House and Senate versions, which means a House-Senate conference committee after bills have passed both Houses and the possibility of a trip-up on a final conference report.
The final price tag is around $850 billion, with $550 billion in spending and $300 billion in tax cuts. It looks like the most controversial tax cut–one letting companies write off current losses against tax liabilities dating back five years–could be modified or dropped by congressional Democrats, perhaps to include instead a “fix” on the Alternative Minimum Tax for this year, which will otherwise boost taxes on millions of upper-middle-class taxpayers, some of whom are already in financial trouble or unemployed. It’s a reminder of how radically things have changed in Washington that this AMT fix, priced at a cool $70 billion, is pretty much an afterthought.
Here you can find a fairly detailed summary of the House draft.

Today’s Washington Post has an amusing but quite serious tip sheet for those facing Senate confirmation hearings, but Tom Korologus, an expert on this esoteric topic. Here’s the best advice he offers:

Remember that most of the hearing will be more about the questioners than about you. Prepare a short opening statement — no more than five minutes — outlining the president’s goals and your goals for the department. Submit a longer “think piece” for the record….
Hearings can be judged by the 80-20 rule. If the senators are speaking 80 percent of the time, you’re doing fine. If it’s 60-40, you are arguing with them. If it’s 50-50, you’ve blown it.

That rule obviously can’t apply to those nominees who are themselves senators, but otherwise, it’s a good rule of thumb.

It’s been a tumultuous Sunday for the Obama administration and New Mexico Democrats, as NM Governor and Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson removed himself from consideration for the Cabinet pending the completion of a federal investigation of road contracts granted to a Richardson political contributor.
It’s unclear at this point how much if any evidence of wrongdoing has been gathered. The timing of any continuing “pay for play” investigation is obviously bad, thanks to Rod Blagojevich. We also don’t know if Richardson jumped out of the Commerce nomination or was pushed. Certainly the amounts of money involved in the suspected quid ($110,000 in contributions to two Richardson political funds) or the suspected quo ($1.48 million in state highway work) were not very large.
This development, however it turns out, is a definite bummer for New Mexico’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish, who was preparing to take office. Richardson has made it clear he will resume his gubernatorial duties, but he’s term-limited in 2010. Denish will almost certainly run for the job then, but apparently without the benefits of incumbency, if incumbency really is a benefit to anyone trying to govern in the current economic environment.
There’s no hint of names so far to replace Richardson as Commerce Secretary; since his was one of the first announcements made, speculation had not developed very far as to alternatives. One political problem for Team Obama is that the putative Cabinet has now lost its most prominent Latino.

Editor’s note: this item is a reader submission from Christopher Burks, a University of Arkansas law student who has worked for the John Edwards for President campaign, the Democratic Party of Arkansas, the AFL-CIO, and in local Ozark politics.
I. Intro
Ozark Hill Country Populism is alive and well above the land of Wal-Mart and, if employed with a clear call incorporated across all messaging, such economic populism will now win Democrats campaigns across demographically diverse districts.
II. Fire on the Mountain
“The People,” yells the bearded, foot-stomping speaker. “The People,” thunders the fiery, ever-louder man, his face shaking as his calls bounce around the dimly lit basement barroom, unable to contain the near wrath within.
“Two Words: The People.” Ever louder, this cry reverberates several more times in the course of what can’t be described as standard political stump speech.
Few calls are so impassioned, so fiery, that they make the leap to something beyond a mere sound bite. But it is undeniable that such a rallying cry can sear itself into the popular imagination.
Cesar Chavez stood in solidarity with farm laborers and cried for dignity. William Jennings Bryan proclaimed farmers and laborers were one and cried for a monetary policy that didn’t hang people out to dry in the harsh winds of famine. Huey Long cried that every man should be a King.
King cried for peace and reconciliation, but his Dream was delivered at a march organized for jobs and justice.
Bryan, Long, Chavez, and King were products of differing times and ideologies, but all knew that economic security was the way forward for workers and each punctured the air with cries to stop the robber barons in what each viewed as a gilded age.
Ultimately, though, clarion calls can too become coda. Men and nations may become a caricature of their former imagined selves, but, here atop a beautiful Ozark hill ensconced in the full majesty of fall colors, “The People” is finding its place amongst the rallying cries of yonder lore and is cementing the political consciousness of the citizenry, ever mindful of the motto of the Great State of Arkansas:
“Regnat Populus. The People Rule.”
III. 21st Century Economic Populism
The common thread weaving through the clarion calls above is clear: populism that worked.

Read more…

Any summary of all the year-end assessments of 2008 would be incomplete without taking note of Rich Lowry’s column on the years of American history that were worse. He lists 1798, 1837, 1862, 1940 and 1968 as bigger bummers. And that’s coming from a conservative who undoubtedly considers the electoral results of 2008 a large calamity.
This silver-lining column did not represent a unanimous conservative judgment, of course. At Lowry’s National Review site, Victor Davis Hanson called 2008 “the Roaring 20s, the bleak 1930s, and the Sixties — all rolled into one,” and worse yet, as a time when “50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized.”
Now that’s a silver lining any progressive can appreciate.