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Editor’s Corner

GOP Immigration Policy = Labor Shortages + Rotting Crops

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 29, 2011.
Georgia is often classified with the reddest of states, not without some reason, even though a third of the voters are people of color. But the new Republican Governor Nathan Deal has just signed into law a bill which could push some white rural voters, thoughtful farmers in particular, into the Democratic column.
The reason is nicely encapsulated in the title of Jeremy Redmon’s Atlanta Constitution article “Farmers Tie Labor Shortage to State’s New Immigration Law, Ask for Help,” which explains:

This month, Gov. Nathan Deal signed House Bill 87 into law. Among other things, the law punishes people who transport or harbor illegal immigrants here. It also authorizes police to investigate the immigration status of suspects they believe have committed state or federal crimes and who cannot produce identification, such as a driver’s license, or provide other information that could help police identify them.
Georgia’s agricultural industry — the largest in the state — vigorously opposed HB 87 in the Legislature, arguing it could scare away migrant workers and damage the state’s economy

The consequences thus far, are less than impressive, according to Redmon:

Migrant farmworkers are bypassing Georgia because of the state’s tough new immigration enforcement law, creating a severe labor shortage among fruit and vegetable growers here and potentially putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops in jeopardy, agricultural industry leaders said this week.
…Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, said he has been in close contact with Labor Commissioner Mark Butler and Agricultural Commissioner Gary Black about the shortage, calling it the most severe he has seen. Hall said it’s possible state officials could hold job fairs to steer some of Georgia’s unemployed workers to these farm jobs, which pay $12.50 an hour on average. The state’s unemployment rate is now at 9.9 percent.
Farmers, however, say they often have little luck recruiting Georgia residents to work in their fields because it is temporary, hot and physically demanding. To recruit more workers, some farmers are offering signing bonuses, Hall said.
The law doesn’t take effect until July 1 but is already making migrant Hispanic farmworkers skittish, said Dick Minor, a partner with Minor Brothers Farm in Leslie in southwest Georgia who says he is missing about 50 of his workers now, threatening as much as a third of his crops.
Some farmers who work in Georgia’s $1.1 billion fruit and vegetable industry are now reporting they have only two-thirds or half the workers they need now and for the weeks of harvesting to come, Hall said. Farmers said the full extent of the shortages won’t be known until the coming weeks as they harvest their remaining crops, including watermelons and sweet corn. Hall estimated such shortages could put as much as $300 million in crops at risk this year.

Georgia’s pain may translate into Florida’s gain, reports Redmon:

Manuel De La Rosa, who recruits workers for Minor’s farm, confirmed many migrant workers are skipping Georgia for other states, including Florida. He said these workers became afraid after they heard Hispanic television news programs comparing Georgia’s new law to a stringent one Arizona enacted last year.
“Some of the people who were coming over here to [pick] cucumbers said: ‘No. They are going to catch us. They are going to put us in jail,’ ” said De La Rosa, a U.S. citizen. “Some of them were going to try another state where they have not passed this law yet.”

While white southern voters have often displayed a singular genius for voting against their own economic interests, the sheer idiocy of Republican immigration “reform” in Georgia and other states should give rural Georgians pause the next time some Republican leader prattles on about GOP pro-business creds. Redmon adds:

Meanwhile, the state’s Republican labor and agricultural commissioners are discussing issuing a joint statement in the coming days about what they intend to do about the labor shortage, a Labor Department spokesman confirmed Thursday.

No doubt Georgians await the next edition of GOP business acumen with baited breath, while state consumers may not be too thrilled with expected price hikes at the supermarket, courtesy of the Republican Governor and legislators. Here’s hoping Georgia Dems call them out.


Deficits Still Don’t Matter to Republicans

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on May 12, 2011.
Think there will eventually be a bipartisan deal to increase the public debt limit after an extended period of Kabuki Theater posturing? Maybe it’s time to think again.
Ezra Klein really hits the nail on the head in describing the “negotiations” as they stand today:

The negotiation that we’re having, in theory, is how to cut the deficit in order to give politicians in both parties space to increase the debt limit. But if you look closely at the positions, that’s not really the negotiation we’re having. Republicans are negotiating not over the deficit, but over tax rates and the size of government. That’s why they’ve ruled revenue “off the table” as a way to reduce the deficit, and why they are calling for laws and even constitutional amendments that cap federal spending rather than attack deficits. Democrats, meanwhile, lack a similarly clear posture: most of them are negotiating to raise the debt ceiling, but a few are trying to survive in 2012, and a few more are actually trying to reduce the deficit, and meanwhile, the Obama administration just met with the Senate Democrats to ask them to please, please, stop laying down new negotiating markers every day.
If we were really just negotiating over the deficit, this would be easy. The White House, the House Republicans, the House Progressives, the House Democrats and the Senate Republicans have all released deficit-reduction plans. There’s not only apparent unanimity on the goal, but a broad menu of approaches. We’d just take elements from each and call it a day. But if the Republicans are negotiating over their antipathy to taxes and their belief that government should be much smaller, that’s a much more ideological, and much tougher to resolve, dispute. The two parties don’t agree on that goal. And if the Democrats haven’t quite decided what their negotiating position is, save to survive this fight both economically and politically, that’s not necessarily going to make things easier, either. Negotiations are hard enough when both sides agree about the basic issue under contention. They’re almost impossible when they don’t.

It’s worth underlining that “deficits” and “debt” don’t in themselves mean any more to conservatives than they did when then-Vice President Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter” in 2002. Every Republican “deficit reduction” proposal is keyed to specific spending cuts–without new revenues–and increasingly, to an arbitrary limit on spending as a percentage of GDP. Even the version of a constitutional balanced budget amendment that Sen. Jim DeMint is insisting on as part of any debt limit deal would have a spending-as-percentage-of-GDP “cap” (at 18%, as compared to about 24% currently) that would force huge spending reductions (you can guess from where since GOPers typically consider defense spending as off-limits as taxes).
Today’s Republicans are simply using deficits as an excuse to revoke as much of the New Deal/Great Society tepid-welfare-state system as they can get away with. And it’s really just a latter stage of the old conservative Starve-the-Beast strategy for deliberately manufacturing deficits in order to cut spending. Democrats should point this out constantly, and not let Republicans get away with claiming they are only worried about debt and fiscal responsibility.


Political Case for Afghanistan Drawdown Coming Into Focus

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 10, 2011.
Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA15) has a post up at HuffPo “Why Dick Lugar Wants Drawdown; Why Defense Industries Don’t,” which makes a strong case for accelerating withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Honda, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Taskforce says:

A drawdown is what the majority of the American people want. They want us to end America’s longest war in history. They want us to stop spending $120 billion a year in Afghanistan, particularly when our heavy military footprint is not making Americans or Afghans safer. In the last year, we had the highest number of U.S. casualties, the biggest single-year spike in insurgent attacks, the most devastating of Afghan civilian deaths (an airstrike on nine youths gathering wood), an Afghan majority that says their basic security and basic services have worsened substantially, and majority populations in the U.S. and Afghanistan that want the troops to leave.

Senator Lugar (R-IN) had made news with this sobering observation about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan:

“Our geostrategic interests are threatened in numerous locations, not just by terrorism, but by debt, economic competition, energy and food prices, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and numerous other forces,” he said in a statement. “Solving these problems will be much more difficult if we devote too many resources toward one country that, historically, has frustrated nation building experiments.”

Honda’s claim about public opinion is affirmed to some extent in the latest Pew Research Center poll, conducted May 5-8, which found that 49 percent of respondents want to “remove troops as soon as possible,” while 43 percent want to “keep troops in until situation has stabilized.” In an NBC News-Hart/McInturff poll conducted 5/5-7, 46 percent of respondents “somewhat disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” of “leaving some American troops in Afghanistan until 2014,” while 42 percent said they “strongly approve” or “somewhat approve.”
Honda advocates transferring U.S. funding for our large occupation force to support “policing, intelligence and negotiations…at a fraction of the cost of the heavy military, air and navy operations that currently characterize our security strategy.” He admits it won’t be easy, but he argues persuasively that it is the right way to go:

Such a shift requires courage, especially for members of Congress, given all the industries that benefit from our footprint-heavy warfare. But now is the time to take that necessary step. Our country has been emboldened, and we must now leverage this unity into a new direction for our defense apparatus — one that will keep us safer in every possible way, from our forces to our finances.

Writing in The American Prospect, Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, believes that that bin Laden’s death may provide an opportunity to open political dialogue:

By dealing a blow to al-Qaeda — and by implication, to its allies in the Taliban and its protectors in Pakistan’s intelligence establishment — bin Laden’s death may have created new opportunities for a political settlement in Afghanistan. While experts across the political spectrum have been calling for talks with elements of the Taliban, opponents have argued that because the U.S. had not turned the tide militarily, now was not the time. It’s hard to imagine a bigger military momentum-changer than the bin Laden operation. Military and regional experts from Gen. David Petraeus on down have said for years that a political solution — one that gives Afghans a stake in their government — as opposed to military intervention is the key to scaling back the administration’s 2009 surge and ultimately ending U.S. combat operations there. But given that the war in Afghanistan was about more than just finding bin Laden, our withdrawal will likely occur independently of his death.

President Obama showed bold leadership in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound at considerable risk. His challenge now is to provide equally-strong leadership in dramatically scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan, while advancing the incentives for a political settlement. In so doing he will strengthen Democratic prospects, as well as our national security.


FL GOP War Vs. Dem Voters Intensifies

This item by J.P. Green was first published on May 4, 2011.
One of the more disturbing and under-reported stories these days is the Republican campaign to obstruct voting by pro-Democratic groups. It’s happening in many states, and it’s a more serious threat than usual, as a result of GOP gains in November, which give them additional leverage in state legislatures.
The Miami Herald is doing a pretty good job of covering this campaign in Florida, and I would urge progressives to monitor the GOP’s voter suppression efforts at the state level more closely. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a report by the Herald’s Steve Bousquet on Democratic Senator Bill Nelson’s critique of Florida’s recent efforts at election law “reform”:

Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson blasted state Republican lawmakers Monday for an election law overhaul that he says will block college students and military personnel from having their votes counted next year when he and President Barack Obama both seek re-election.
Then Nelson waded into a controversy of his own when he suggested the U.S. special forces that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden could be blocked from voting if the Legislature passes the bill.
“Should we deny those very military that carried out this very successful decapitating of the al-Qaida snake?” Nelson asked at a Capitol news conference. “Should we deny them because they have signed their voter registration card in a different way than they signed their absentee ballot overseas?”

Senator Nelson’s point is well-put and well-timed. Naturally, Florida Republicans went ballistic and accused Nelson of, gasp, political opportunism. Bousquet explains what the ‘reform’ proposals would do:

The target of Nelson’s wrath are bills awaiting floor votes in the last few days of the session. Under the proposed changes, voters could not update addresses at the polls unless they moved within their county, and third-party groups that don’t turn in voter registration forms within 48 hours would face $50-a-day fines.

The Herald’s Joy-Ann Reid elaborates in her Sunday article, “In Florida, GOP Squeezes Obama-friendly Voters“:

In Florida, the GOP-dominated legislature will soon pass laws squeezing the voting methods favored by minorities, college students and the working class.
Between them, the House and Senate bills would cut early voting from two weeks to one; force people who need to update their name or address on Election Day (say, due to marriage or divorce or a move by a military family) to vote on provisional ballots; and impose onerous restrictions on groups registering people to vote.
In the most extreme case, Republicans hope to pack the Supreme Court to undermine the anti-gerrymandering Fair Districts Amendments voted through by a public who actually thought the authoritarians in Tallahassee would let a little thing like the Constitution come between them and their stranglehold on power.
And in an especially creative flourish, Rick Scott and his Cabinet have revived the spirit of Jim Crow by re-imposing restrictions on voting rights restoration that had been brought into the 21st Century by former Gov. Charlie Crist.

As for the motivation behind the FL GOP reforms, Reid explains:

Florida’s two-week early voting period was among the reforms meant to prevent embarrassments like the 2000 election. It was a hard-won victory for working people who sometimes can’t get to the polls if they work odd hours, or run out of time to resolve a problem at the polls.
Arguably, it also contributed to Obama’s Florida win in 2008, as black churches and college students took full advantage of the extra time (and the history-making opportunity)…Karen Andre, who ran the Liberty City/Little Haiti office for the Obama campaign, called the impact of early voting in those neighborhoods “amazing…It was raining constantly during early voting and people would not leave the polls,” she said.
Held harmless by the “reformers” will be absentee voting, which happens to be the method used most effectively by Republicans.

Early voting and same day registration “have been critical in getting sizable numbers of black, Hispanic and young voters to the polls, particularly in presidential elections,” according to the Reid Report’s “Florida Republicans’ War on Voting Continues.”
Lawsuits to stop the Florida GOP’s disenfranchisement campaign are expected, but prospects for a favorable decision are unclear at best. In any case, Democrats in Florida and other states facing similar shenanigans now have an extra incentive to break records in registering new voters and turning them out in ’12.


Obama has made strategic mistakes, but waiting until the Republicans revealed their extremist agenda before presenting his own more rational alternative was not one of them.

This item by James Vega was first published on April 20, 2011.
Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?


Can Dems Retake the House?

This item by J.P. Green was first published on April 19, 2011.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Nate Silver agree that Dems have a good chance to win back a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, which should be cause for some concern among smarter Republicans. Here’s Abramowitz, from his current column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats would only need to pick up 25 seats in 2012 to get to the magic number of 218 that would give them control of the House-assuming that all of their members supported the Democratic candidate for Speaker. That’s hardly an insurmountable number. In fact, two of the last three elections, 2006 and 2010, have produced bigger swings, and 2008 came close.
Despite the recent volatility of House elections, some astute political observers are giving the Democrats little or no chance of regaining control of the House in 2012. For example, last December, Republican pollster Glen Bolger went so far as to “guarantee” that the GOP would maintain its House majority even if President Obama were to win a second term. And just last month, respected political handicapper Charlie Cook agreed that a Democratic pickup of 25 or more seats in the House was highly unlikely.
Both Bolger and Cook cited the relatively short coattails that winning presidential incumbents have had in recent years as a major obstacle to big Democratic gains in the 2012 House elections. In the past 40 years, the largest number of House seats gained by the winning incumbent’s party was 16 in 1984, a year in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide. You have to go all the way back to 1964 to find an election in which the winning incumbent’s party gained at least 25 seats in the House.
Notwithstanding these predictions and the historical record, however, there are three reasons to believe that Democrats have a decent chance of taking back control of the House in 2012. First, as a result of their big gains in 2010, Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in House districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2008; second, many of those districts are likely to vote for Obama again in 2012 because of the difference between the presidential and midterm electorate in the current era; and third, Republican incumbents in these Obama districts will be at high risk of losing their seats if Obama wins because straight-ticket voting is much more prevalent now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Further, adds Abramowitz,

…There are 60 Republicans in districts that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 including 15 in districts that Obama carried by at least 10 points. In contrast, there are only 12 Democrats in districts that were carried by John McCain in 2008 and only six in districts that McCain carried by at least 10 points.

As for the GOP’s supposed edge in redistricting, Abramowitz notes:

Of course before the 2012 congressional elections take place, House districts will be redrawn based on the results of the 2010 Census. In states where Republicans control redistricting-and the number of such states grew considerably as a result of the 2010 midterm elections-GOP legislatures may be able to redraw the lines to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents. However, the ability of Republican legislatures to protect their party’s House incumbents may be limited by the dramatic increase in the past decade in the nonwhite share of the population in many states. For example, while Republicans will control redistricting in Texas, which is gaining four House seats, more than any other state, most of the population growth in Texas has been because of the rapid increase in the Hispanic population. At least one, if not two, of the new Texas House districts are likely to go to Hispanics.

Abramowitz also cites the increased turnout, over the mid terms, of Obama-friendly constituencies in a presidential election, particularly Latino voters, who are growing even faster than expected, according to the latest census data. But he believes the Dems strongest card may be the rising trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years. Abramowitz stops short of predicting a Dem takeover of the House, but he calls it a “realistic” possibility, especially if Obama wins a “decisive victory” in ’12.
Nate Silver sees the budget fight and the vote on GOP Rep. Ryan’s draconian budget proposals as a potential net plus for Democratic congressional candidates. Silver explains in a recent five thirty eight post,

So far, no polls have been conducted on Mr. Ryan’s budget as a whole. But — although voters will like the deficit reduction it claims to achieve (several outside analysts have questioned the bill’s economic findings) — a couple of its individual elements figure to be quite unpopular. In particular, the bill includes substantial changes to Medicare and Medicaid — changes that many voters tell pollsters are unacceptable. And it would cut the top tax rates, when polls usually find that most Americans want taxes on upper-income Americans to be raised rather than lowered.

Silver also believes that the Republicans’ prospects for a senate takeover next year are overstated. Echoing Abramowitz’s point about the decline in split-ticket voting, he sees the vote on Ryan’s proposals as a potential game-changer for the House:

…One possible consequence of the vote is that it could tie the fate of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress more closely together. In the past, presidents have rarely had substantial coattails when running for a second term; Bill Clinton’s Democrats won just 9 seats in the House in 1996, for instance, even though he beat Bob Dole overwhelmingly. In 2010, however, the share of the vote received by Democrats running for Congress was very strongly correlated with support for Mr. Obama, and today’s vote could deepen that connection, making it less likely that voters will return a divided government again.

When two of the sharpest political data analysts agree that the House may be up for grabs, the DNC and Dem contributors should take note and invest accordingly. Of course there is a difference between Dems having a decent chance to win back a House majority and the probability of it happening. For the moment, however, The President appears to be moving into solid position to leverage the trend toward straight-ticket voting for the benefit of the Party. With a favorable break or two on the economy, the possibility of a Dem takeover of the House could morph into a good bet.


Ryan Proposes End to Great Society (Except for the War Part)

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on April 5, 2011.
The wave of conservative hype greeting the release of Rep. Paul Ryan’s draft budget resolution is a pretty clear indication the Republican Party is about to take a deep breath and go over the brink into a direct assault on the programs and commitments that gave the United States a small replica of the modern welfare state common in the rest of the developed world. So excited are they that the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who normally likes to position himself as an eagle soaring above the grubby machinations of both political parties, just can’t contain himself:

Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate….
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

Wow, you can almost hear the soaring music of a Tim Pawlenty ad when you read that passage! As Brooks would have it, Ryan’s assault on “the welfare state” isn’t really debatable; it’s based on Revealed Truth that all honorable people will accept and only scoundrels will deny. Anyone second-guessing this leader who has exposed Barack Obama’s cowardice must come with his or her own six-trillion dollar package of cuts for benefits affecting those people whose aspirations to luxury items like health insurance are now “unsustainable.”
But while Brooks and others praising Ryan’s budget are laughable in lauding the “courage” of a safe-seat congressman throwing red meat to his party’s base while taking on the poor and disabled and delighting private health insurers and anyone paying corporate taxes–they are right about Ryan’s audacity.
The simple way to put it is that Ryan’s budget steers clear of taking on the signature New Deal social program, Social Security, but takes dead aim on the Great Society’s accomplishment of a partial set of guarantees for access to health care.
By any meaningful measurement, Ryan’s proposal would kill Medicare by privatizing it and capping its costs, and kill Medicaid by making it simply a soon-to-be-phased-down grant to states with no obligation to provide a set of minimum benefits for the poor and disabled.
On the first point, Josh Marshall nicely explains why privatizing Medicare destroys its very rationale:

We all know about pre-existing conditions. You’re a cancer survivor so no insurer will cover you. Or you have one of the myriad possible conditions that make you a bad risk. And no insurer wants to issue a policy for someone who odds say is likely to cost a lot of money. Well, guess what, people over 65 all have a preexisting condition: they’re old!
Now, not that people aren’t living longer and longer lives. And plenty of folks in their late 60s are in better health than folks 10 or 20 years younger. But by and large, we all know how this life thing works. When you hit your mid-60s or so, things start breaking down. And eventually, you die. That’s a bald way to put it. But we all understand that this is true. The simple truth is that for all the problems with private health insurance for the young and working age populations, it just doesn’t work for seniors.
We tried it. That’s why we ended up creating Medicare.

We created Medicaid (originally a Republican alternative to universal health coverage) to ensure that people with insufficient funds to purchase health services or insurance or whose health costs outstripped their ability to pay would not, to put it pretty bluntly, get even sicker and/or die. Ryan’s “block grant” proposal would end any personal claim on health services for any American, and would simply subsidize state health care programs for the indigent and the disabled (a subsidy guaranteed to be a fat target in futue federal deficit reduction efforts once the “problem” is thought of as a state responsibility). Here’s a mild estimate of what that would involve from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

States would most likely use their additional flexibility to cap Medicaid enrollment and put people on waiting lists once the cap was reached (which they cannot do today), significantly scale back eligibility for millions of low-income children, parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities and seniors — driving many of them into the ranks of the uninsured — or cut services substantially, with the result that many of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people could become underinsured.

With respect to Medicaid, the downward spiral of eligibility and benefits contemplated by Ryan’s proposal would occur after the immediate disqualification of an estimated 15 million Americans who would obtain Medicaid coverage under the provisions of last year’s health reform legislation, which Ryan would repeal. That’s quite a giant leap backward for anyone supporting the basic idea of universal health coverage.
Against the background of a budget that will apparently leave defense spending pretty much as it is, while applying any savings from closing tax loopholes to the lowering of top and corporate rates, Ryan’s Medicare/Medicaid proposals are astoundingly unbalanced. For all the talk about his “courage,” it’s also noteworthy that Ryan insulates today’s seniors (who happen to be more heavily Republican in their voting preferences than at any time in recent memory) from any changes in Medicare, while targeting a Medicaid-eligible population with few GOP voters.
To conservative ideologues who think America went fatally wrong in the Great Society years–except, of course, for the establishment of a National Security State supporting a vast array of overseas military commitments that helped our allies afford their own welfare states–Ryan’s budget makes perfect sense. In taking on Ryan, it’s imperative that Democrats begin by making it clear exactly what is at stake.


A “common-sense populist” Democratic Communication Strategy for Re-building Public Trust in Government

This TDS Strategy Memo by Andrew Levison was first published on March 16, 2011.

Download pdf of this article
In a 2007 article in The American Prospect, pollster Stan Greenberg provided a particularly cogent description of the profound political problem that the decline in trust of government poses for the Democratic coalition:

There is a new reality that Democrats must deal with if they are to be successful going forward. In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans’ confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America’s problems. Democrats will not make sustainable gains unless they are able to restore the public’s confidence in its capacity to act through government.
…”the scale of damage done to people’s belief in government is enormous… 62% in a Pew study said they believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. By 57% to 29% Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life rather than helping people. 85% say that if the government had more money it would waste it rather than spend it well.
Although people may favor government action on critical issues like health care, education and energy their lack of trust in governments capacity to spend money properly means that their first priority is to cut wasteful spending and make government more accountable. People are desperate to see accountability from Washington, not just in the spending of tax dollars with no discernible results but also in politicians’ behavior… To have any chance of getting heard on their agenda, Democrats need to stand up and take on the government–not its size or scope, but its failure to be accountable–and deliver the results that people expect for the taxes they pay.

A more recent strategy memo by Greenberg’s Democracy Corps focuses on the overwhelming distrust and contempt with which Congress in particular is viewed:

Voters are disgusted with ‘business as usual’ in Washington. There is a deep and pervasive belief, particularly among independents, that special interests are running things and Members of Congress listen more to those that fund their campaigns than the voters that they are supposed to be representing. Three quarters believe that special interests hold too much influence over Washington today while fewer than a quarter believe that ordinary citizens can still influence what happens in politics. Similarly, nearly 80 percent say that Members of Congress are trolled by the groups that help fund their political campaigns while fewer than a fifth believe that Members listen more to the voters.

For Democrats the fundamental “take-away” from Greenberg’s analysis is simple. Until this profound distrust is overcome Democrats will be unable to pass any major new social legislation or political reform. Democrats have no alternative. They must reduce the enormous cynicism Americans now feel about government.
In political terms the most important demographic group whose opinions of government Democrats must seek to change is the white working class–people who have less than a college degree and are generally employed in “working class” rather than “middle class” jobs. Their support for Democrats plummeted by 12 percent between 2008 and 2010 in large part because of this issue. Without regaining a substantial part of this lost support in 2012, a Democratic victory will be close to impossible.
What Democrats need is a coherent strategy for addressing the complex mixture of attitudes that lies behind hostility and distrust of government–a strategy that not only addresses the problem in a meaningful way but which can also be presented in a consistent and convincing communications campaign.


Repeat After Me: It’s Not About the Money!

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 18, 2011.
One of the most effective talking-points of the unions and Democratic legislators battling Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin was: “It’s Not About the Money!” This battle-cry drew attention to the fact that Walker’s union-busting agenda had little or nothing to do with the state’s fiscal crisis, which Walker himself had helped engineer by pushing corporate tax cuts.
It’s time to make the same point in terms of the Republican agenda in Congress. Much of the battle between Ds and Rs over non-defense discretionary spending isn’t about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling abortion and contraceptive services, to repealing last year’s health reform legislation. Indeed, appropriations “riders” that have nothing to do with spending levels are what conservative House members are most adamantly demanding in return for supporting any appropriations bill, temporary or permanent. In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to go after government functions that Republicans would object to even if the budget was in surplus.
Now on one level this isn’t surprising or even wrong-minded; the two parties can and should reflect their own sense of priorities in every budget decision, not just those driven by concerns or negotiations over spending reductions. But these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making “painful but necessary cuts.”
The truth is that most Republican these days would prefer to live in a country with little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks; a far more regressive tax code than has been the case historically; workplaces with no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages; a status quo ante health care system in which private insurers are free to discriminate and rising costs are borne by the sickest and poorer Americans; the social safety net is weaker and not subject to any national minimum norms; and abortion (plus many forms of contraception) is illegal. They’d also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and a federal government limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century in which the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
It’s their right to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Americans would be very unhappy with it, it’s the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.
I made a small effort to do this on a nationally syndicated public radio show today, and am resolved to keep it up at the risk of redundancy. So should you.


GOP 2011-12 Agenda: Union and Voter Suppression

This item by J.P. Green was first published on March 11, 2011.
Twenty months out from the 2012 election, the GOP’s voter suppression strategy is taking shape. By crushing public sector unions and expanding felon and student disenfranchisement, they hope to weaken Democratic turnout. While they have always supported these strategies, the margins Republicans gained in state houses in the November elections have empowered them to launch a much stronger voter suppression campaign.
There is reason to hope that their efforts to gut public sector unions will backfire, as evidenced by recent public opinion polls regarding Governor Walker’s union-busting campaign in Wisconsin. The fact that Walker exempted the three unions that supported him is proof enough that his primary objective is to disempower public unions because they have provided significant support for Democratic candidates.
In Florida, Governor Scott and his cohorts on the all-Republican Executive Clemency Board are setting a new standard for shameless partisan sleaze, with a racist twist. Here’s how Peter Wallsten’s Washington Post article explained this bit of political chicanery:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Cabinet-level officials voted unanimously Wednesday to roll back state rules enacted four years ago that made it easier for many ex-felons to regain the right to vote.
Now, under the new rules, even nonviolent offenders would have to wait five years after the conclusion of their sentences to apply for the chance to have their civil rights restored.

In 2007 Florida Governor Charlie Crist initiated a measure to make civil rights restoration “almost automatic” for most ex-felons. Wallsten reports that more than 100,000 ex-felons took advantage of Crists initiative to attempt to register to vote. “Experts say many of those new voters were likely Democratic-leaning African Americans,” reports Wallsten, which likely helped Obama win Florida.
Approximately 54,000 ex-felons in Florida had their civil rights restored since 2007, before which the state restored the rights of only about 8,000 ex-felons annually, according to the ACLU.
The “rationale,” for the initiative according to a spokesperson for the Republican Florida A.G.:

“This issue of civil rights restoration is about principle, not partisanship…Attorney General Bondi is philosophically opposed to the concept of automatic restoration of civil rights and believes not only that felons should apply for their rights, but wait for a period of time in order to attest to their rehabilitation and commitment to living a crime-free life.

Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sees the Republican measure a little differently. “It clearly has the effect of suppressing the vote as we go into a presidential election cycle.”
Unfortunately, the constitutionality of felon disenfranchisement has been upheld in courts from time to time, even though punishing people beyond the terms of their sentence remains a dubious proposition in a real democracy. Certainly the Florida Republicans have no qualms about making a mockery of the principle of rehabilitation in their criminal justice system. And no fair-minded person could deny that felon disenfranchisement targets African Americans, given their disproportionate incarceration rates, which numerous scholars have attributed to bias in sentencing.
In addition to the Republican efforts to crush public employee unionism and disenfranchise African American voters, Tobin Van Ostern reports at Campus Progress on the escalation of the conservative campaign to disenfranchise another pro-Democratic group, students:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization linked to corporate and right-wing donors, including the billionaire Koch brothers, has drafted and distributed model legislation, obtained by Campus Progress, that appears to be the inspiration for bills proposed by state legislators this year and promoted by Tea Party activists, bills that would limit access of young people to vote.
…Charles Monaco, the press and new media specialist at the Progressive States Network, a state-based organization that has been tracking this issue, says, “ALEC is involved with a vast network of well-funded right wing organizations working to spread voter ID laws in the state legislatures. It is clear what their purpose is with these laws–to reduce progressive turnout and tilt the playing field towards their preferred candidates in elections.”

In Wisconsin and New Hampshire, for example,

Conservative representatives in the state have proposed a law, backed by Walker, that would ban students from using in-state university- or college-issued IDs for proof-of-residency when voting. If this legislation became law, it would become one of the strictest voter registration laws in the country and would provide significant logistical and financial barriers for a variety of groups, including student and minority voters.
Meanwhile, as Campus Progress reported last month, in New Hampshire, state House Speaker William O’Brien (R- Hillsborough 4) says that proposed election legislation will “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident.” O’Brien claims that college towns experience hundreds of same-day voter registrations and that those are the ballots of people who “are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

To repeat, the Speaker of the New Hampshire House says it’s OK to deny a group of predominantly young people voting rights because they are “voting liberal.” If Dems don’t make an ad about that targeting youth voters nationwide, they should be cited for political negligence. In other states,

…According to research by the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN) and Campus Progress, in the past six years, seven states have enacted laws that disenfranchise students or make it more difficult for them to vote. This year, 18 additional states are considering similar laws, while other states are proposing voter ID laws that would depress turnout among other groups of voters–particularly those who traditionally lean left…These requirements run the gamut from requiring in-state driver’s licenses, to banning school IDs, to prohibiting first-time voters–essentially every college-aged voter–from voting by absentee ballot…

There can be no doubt at this point about the GOP’ political strategy for 2011-12: Crush unions, disenfranchise ex-felons and students — such are the often unintended consequences of voting Republican. For Dems, the challenges couldn’t be more clear: Publicize the GOP’s contempt for voting rights; Reach out to win the support of blue collar workers and energize our base constituencies with bold, populist reforms that create jobs and protect and improve their living standards.