Today is Earth Day, which led me to some ruminations on the lost bipartisanship of this commemoration at Washington Monthly:

It’s Earth Day, and also the 45th anniversary of the annual event identified with the modern U.S. environmental movement. But for the people running for the GOP presidential nomination, it’s just another day to run away from Mother Earth.
At Bloomberg Politics, Mark Drajem has a useful round-up of the views of all the major presidential candidates on global climate change and associated issues….
In terms of current positions, though, there’s less disagreement than meets the eye:

Observers would have to squint hard to detect any movement among the main Republican candidates. They all back the Keystone XL pipeline, embrace the boom in U.S. oil and gas production, say the economy trumps climate action now and, among those that answered, say a deal to cut emissions between Obama and China is one-sided and toothless.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the first Earth Day in 1970 are also old enough to remember when environmentalism was a thoroughly bipartisan cause. Yes, even then there were conservatives who criticized the commemoration or hinted darkly at its un-American nature–it was held, after all, on the centennial of Lenin’s birth! I recall National Review editorially suggesting the best way to celebrate Earth Day was: “Pick up a beer can. Throw it at a pollutocrat.” Like the rest of movement conservatism, this fringy attitude towards environmental protection has very nearly conquered all in today’s GOP. It would be nice if Earth Day were again bipartisan, but if not, then it’s another thing to add to the list of high stakes for the next election–maybe at the very top.

It’s pretty well-established that one of the “fundamentals” that damaged Democrats in 2014 was a big lag between improving economic indicators and public perceptions of how the economy was performing.
Well, now the perceptions are catching up, and I discussed the implications today at Washington Monthly:

This new finding from Bloomberg Politics‘ polling (as reported by Margaret Talev) is a pretty big deal, assuming it holds up as a trend:

Americans are becoming more optimistic about the country’s economic prospects by several different measures. President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy is being seen more positively than negatively for the first time in more than five years, 49 percent to 46 percent—his best number in this poll since September 2009.

Here’s the under-side of that optimism, though:

[T]he national survey of 1,008 adults, conducted April 6-8, also reveals that about three-fourths of Democrats and independents, along with a majority of Republicans, say the gap is growing between the rich and everyone else—and a majority of women want the government to intervene to shrink it. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

So it may well be that Hillary Clinton’s talk about inequality isn’t just a response to progressives unhappy with Obama’s “centrism,” but a theme we’ll be hearing more of both from her and from Obama himself as the obvious thing for a left-of-center pol to talk about when the overall direction of the economy is looking better. It also probably means that we’ll hear Republicans continue their awkward efforts to suggest shrinking government will unleash upward mobility. All in all, optimism about what a Democratic president is doing plus concerns traditionally associated with Democrats is a pretty good public opinion backdrop for a Democratic non-incumbent.

To put it another way, improving perceptions of the economy amid growing worries about inequality not only strengthens the case for another Democratic presidency but undermines the GOP’s case that it’s “time for a change.”

Something you hear regularly going into this cycle is that Democrats could suffer from “fatigue” or even a “curse” in association with the fact that they have held the White House for two consecutive terms. This makes me a little crazy, because (a) this is a very small data set from which to draw any predictive conclusions, and (b) the data we do have are often examined uncritically. So with some help from academic circles, I examined this myth at Washington Monthly:
To the extent that we are going to keep hearing that Democrats are handicapped in 2016 by “fatigue” with being the party controlling the White House since 2008, it’s helpful to have a truly comprehensive look at the precedents, as supplied the other day by Washington University’s John Patty at Mischiefs of Faction:

Is it really “hard” for a party to hang on to the White House for 12 years? The obvious answer is, “yes,” it is generally unlikely to that one party will control the White House for 3 terms. But, let’s do some math, with admittedly limited evidence.
If we accept that George Washington and John Adams were of the same “party,” then the presidency was held by the same party for the first 12 years (3 terms) of the Republic. Then, Jefferson, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams were co-partisans (of the “other” party relative to Washington and Adams) holding the presidency for 20 years (5 terms). Jackson and Van Buren controlled the presidency for the same party for 12 more years (3 terms).
This ends in 1840, when stuff started to get kind of crazy—at first slowly and then incredibly quickly—as the issue of slavery emerged and stretched the nation to civil war. For 20 years (5 terms), no party held the presidency for more than two terms in a row (and, to be honest, the notion of “party” was remarkably fluid during that time).
Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, and began (for lots of varied reasons) a period of 24 years (6 terms) of one-party control of the presidency. Starting in 1884, we have 12 years of partisan switching, bookended by Grover Cleveland’s (uniquely) non-successive terms in office. We then have 16 years of Republican control of the office under McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft.
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, served two terms, but surrendered the office back to the Republicans in 1920. The Republicans sent Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to the White House for one term each, a period of 12 years. They were followed by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman for 20 years (4 terms).
Let’s pause for a second. Up through the Second World War, there were 2 elections in which one party had controlled the presidency for 8 consecutive years and was defeated. On the other hand, there were 5 elections in which one party had controlled the presidency for (exactly) 8 consecutive years and retained control. That’s over 70% success in holding on for 12 years plus. So, to be clear, from a very naive standpoint, early history suggests that there might be some “partisan momentum.”

Keep that in mind because most “proofs” of what Patty calls the “eight year itch” hypothesis begin, conveniently, in 1948. But even after that the “itch” argument is, well, scratchy:

Moving to the modern (i.e., post WWII) period, there have been 6 elections in which one party has controlled the White House for exactly 8 years. The other party has won 5 of those.
But the five of six are not exactly clear precedents:
1. The 1960 election was very close and arguably riddled (in important ways) with fraud.
Not to mention the fact that 1960 was preceded by two recessions, and that Kennedy (a) benefited from a large net positive in religious voting; and (b) managed, miraculously, to become the preferred candidate of both African-Americans and segregationists.
2. One of these elections was preceded by an eligible incumbent president declining to run (Lyndon Johnson in 1968).

I’d say the assassinations of MLK and RFK and a rapidly escalating war in Vietnam were also unusual factors.

3. Another was fought by an incumbent who was unelected and succeeded an incumbent who resigned in scandal (Gerald Ford was not elected vice-president).
4. A third one led to the phrase “hanging chads” becoming a thing and was arguably ultimately decided in the courts (George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore in 2000).
Thus, we are left with McCain’s loss to Obama in 2008.

And even then, this wasn’t exactly a “normal” election given the economic collapse of 2008 and the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy.

The whole argument really gets weak when you look at the whole record and then the details. Let’s hear less of it moving forward, please.

Now that Hillary Clinton is set to announce her presidential candidacy on Sunday, perhaps we will get some clarity on the hopes and fears she arouses. I wrote about the latter today at Washington Monthly:

Amidst the growing din over Hillary Clinton’s announcement of candidacy Sunday, there’s one voice I’d recommend listening to if only because I do think he’s isolated the main source of angst about HRC among Democrats. Here’s Brian Beutler at TNR today:

[T]here’s still a good argument that the Democratic Party could use a contested primary this cycle: not to toughen up Clinton’s calluses, but to build some redundancy into the presidential campaign. It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.
If you’re faithful to the odds, then most of this anxiety is misplaced. Clinton may have slipped in the polls by virtue of an email scandal and her return to the partisan trenches more generally. But she’s still more popular and better known than all of the Republicans she might face in the general, her name evokes economic prosperity, rather than global financial calamity, the economy is growing right now, and Democrats enjoy structural advantages in presidential elections, generally.
But all candidates are fallible, and most of them are human, which means every campaign labors under the small risk of unexpected collapse. The one real advantage of a strong primary field is that it creates a hedge against just such a crisis. Right now either Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Jeb Bush is favored to win the Republican primary, but if both of them succumb to scandal or health scares, the GOP can shrug it off knowing that other seasoned Republicans have infrastructure in place, and are poised to swoop in if necessary.
If nobody serious challenges Hillary Clinton, nobody can be her understudy. In the near term that isn’t a problem, but if doubts about her inevitability develop late in the year or early next, the placid silence in the Democratic field will grow eerie.

What I like about Brian’s argument is that it’s not really about Hillary Clinton, but about any “putative nominee” for a party facing so crucial a presidential election–one in which, as Beutler points out, a Republican win could very well create one-party government in Washington. Even if you think–as I do–that the risk of an HRC implosion is a lot lower than it would be with anyone else you can think of, it’s still a risk.
But I’m not so sure there’s any realistic way to create what Brian calls an “understudy….”
This is one area where it should be obvious a parliamentary system would be vastly superior–where “understudies” could be deliberately chosen, groomed and promoted by an all-powerful party. Since we don’t have that, Democrats should probably reassure themselves that if HRC looks really vulnerable really early, there would be time for them to get behind a rival, and not necessarily one currently planning to run. So the risk Beutler is talking about, of a late disaster, is analogous to the fear a driver over icy roads harbors when thinking ahead to that last big curve.

I guess another way to look at it is that there are pros and cons to mostly uncontested and heavily contested nomination contests. We certainly saw the latter in 2012, when the GOP nomination contest drove the eventual nominee to the Right, especially on immigration policy. With a larger and even more complex field this time around, Republicans could have themselves a real demolition derby, one that will not necessarily produce the best nominee in the best condition. And even then, their nominee could experience a late collapse. There’s just no way to eliminate risk in a high-stakes presidential contest.

One of the big unresolved arguments from 2014 involved the theory that pro-Democratic groups didn’t just represent a declining share of the electorate in the midterms, but were also showing signs of trending Republican. I wrote about some new evidence from Pew on this subject for Washington Monthly:

[2014] exit polls showed Republicans doing a bit better among millennials, Latinos and even African-Americans, and a lot better among Asians, than in 2012. Similar findings in 2010 led some analysts to conclude that the Obama Coalition only existed when Obama was at the top of the ballot–not a particularly good omen for Democrats looking ahead to 2016. But other analysts argued the logic of figuring that even as midterm elections produced conservative-skewing turnout patterns across demographic lines, they probably do so within demographic groups. Thus, more conservative millennials, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians show up, at least at the margins, and Republicans get a bonus beyond the overall reshaping of the electorate.
There’s some strong if circumstantial evidence of the latter hypothesis in a big new survey from Pew that shows major demographic groups falling more or less into the same partisan preferences (particularly once the hordes of self-identified but bogus indies are pushed to “lean” one way or another) now as in 2012. This includes Millennials, who tilt Democratic by a 51/35 margin; Latinos, Democratic by a 56/26 margin; and Asians (65/23 Democratic after narrowly–at least according to the exit polls–going Republican in 2014).
These numbers should give triumphalist Republicans some pause at a minimum, while reinforcing the belief of many–myself included–that we are in an era of oscillating elections based on different midterm and presidential turnout patterns rather than some sort of steady trend towards the GOP.

These numbers are also a data point against the presumption that the “Obama Coalition” won’t be there for the next Democratic nominee. Indeed, about the only thing placing a thumb on the scales for the GOP in 2016 is the presumption of “voter fatigue” with the two-term Democratic control of the White House. That’s a presumption that relies on a very small sample with mixed results.

With today’s announcement by the president (carried live in Iran, BTW) of a “framework” for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, to be completed by the end of June, we’ll hear an acceleration of cries from Republicans to kill the deal in its cradle, and actual promises from GOP presidential wannabes that they will not honor it if elected.
It’s time for Democrats to go on the offensive, as I argued at the Washington Monthly today:

For those who, like Scott Walker, are already promising to blow up such an agreement on his first day in office, it’s time, as Greg [Sargent] suggests, to ask him what he plans to do about the blowback from our European allies, who, after all, are full participants in the negotiations and will not look kindly on a key signatory cutting and running.
Beyond that, what do the critics think we should do? Seek a different, tougher agreement with different goals (e.g., an Iran with no nuclear capacity at all)? This would almost certainly require that the U.S. go it alone diplomatically. Or are the Scott Walkers of the world ready to follow John Bolton into outfront advocacy of war with Iran? And if that’s the case, where does that leave the fight against IS, which a lot of the same people are anxious to expand as well? Who’s going to replace Iran and its client Iraqi Shia militia in that battle? US troops? Guess we just need to nuke Iran while we are at it, since there are just not enough available boots to put on the ground in both places. Or I guess we could bring back conscription. It’s hard to say, until the critics stop second-guessing Obama and the others negotiating with Iran, and start proving they’ve thought this through beyond tomorrow afternoon.

The sense of outrage Democrats had when Republican senators wrote an open letter to Tehran warning there was no point in negotiating needs to be revived. We’ll need it in the weeks just ahead.

One of the memes we are now hearing is that progressives are being churlish and perhaps even self-destructive in resisting “religious liberty” statutes like those enacted last week in Indiana because, after all, they represent a face-saving device, or even “terms of surrender,” for the Christian Right. I addressed that seductive but misleading argument at some length today at the Washington Monthly:

If you want a good example of what cultural conservatives are telling themselves about the backlash over Indiana’s… “religious liberty” law, there’s none better than the pity party Timothy Carney held at the Washington Examiner yesterday afternoon:

[O]ur culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

I don’t know if actual tears were falling on the keyboard as Carney typed this column, but he certainly wants to give the impression that he speaks for a poor, persecuted minority that has no interest in controlling anybody’s behavior but its own.
Which is, of course, complete hooey.
Yes, conservatives have little choice but to accept legal and political setbacks over marriage equality, but they’re making it as clear as ever that given the opportunity they’d reverse those trends, ban gay marriage all over again and probably bring back the sodomy laws to boot. Look at the huge field of Republican proto-candidates for president. Do any of them actually support marriage equality? Sure, they’ll not talk about it or mumble about it being a state matter or engage in various other evasions, but they’re a long way from “surrendering.” And that’s even more obvious on the abortion issue where (a) the only meaningful difference among 99% of Republican politicians is about whether 99% or 100% of abortions should be banned; (b) Republican controlled state governments are beavering away at new restrictions that strike mainly at the availability of any abortion services; and (c) the right to choose hangs by a thread in a Supreme Court that any Republican President would be lynched for failing to tilt with his or her next appointment into a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
All this weepy talk of being attacked while trying to surrender also misses the even more obvious point that conservatives are hardly impotent politically; they do sorta control Congress and a majority of states.
So no, there’s no real “surrender” going on here, and Lord knows conservatives aren’t withdrawing from political combat; otherwise Carney would have punctuated his long whine by quitting his job. What they are doing is better understood as a strategic retreat: unable to outlaw or (increasingly) even to stigmatize gay behavior as a matter of law, they’re working to protect private discrimination. It’s what a big part of their constituency expects of them, and it’s the obvious next front–not some sort of Appomattox–in the culture wars.

As it happens, it may not even be necessary for Democrats to stiffen their own spines on this subject, since Republicans are drawing friendly fire from their corporate allies on “religious liberty” laws that just aren’t good for business. But don’t cease fire until you see the whites of their flags for real.

It occurred to me yesterday that we were hearing less about “tax reform” on the GOP presidential campaign trail than we were about that old chestnut, the “flat tax.” So I figured I’d do a quick explainer at the Washington Monthly for those confused by the various forms of this bad idea:

Technically speaking, all a “flat” tax means is that whatever is being taxed will be taxed at uniform rates. So the very concept pretty much rules out progressive taxation. “Flat” tax advocates who also emphasize “simplicity”–you know, a tax form you could print out on a post card–are generally alluding to a wholesale elimination of exemptions, deductions and credits, which gets rid of a lot of special-interest provisions along with a host of provisions aimed at reducing or eliminating income taxation on the working poor. If rates are “flattened” too, the net effect would be huge tax breaks for upper- and upper-middle class folk and big tax increases for the poor. Some of these proposals, of course, also casually exempt corporate or investment income from taxation, so the regressive effect is even greater than first appears.
Then you’ve got “flat tax” advocates who simultaneously want to move from income to consumption taxes, which is generally the case with people who talk about “abolishing the IRS,” insofar as merchants would be collecting the taxes rather than a federal agency. This approach is even more regressive than a “flat” income tax, since everybody’s got to “consume,” but poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income covering essential living needs (yes, it’s true some progressive countries, mainly in Europe, depend heavily on consumption taxes, but they deliberately offset them with redistributive spending programs, which is not what our Republicans have in mind).
A lot of these ideas get jumbled together in politicians’ rhetoric, as Paul Waldman noted the other day at the Prospect:

[A]lmost every potential GOP presidential contender has at the very least expressed support for tax flattening, and most of them have come out and endorsed a flat tax.

But the details are hazy and often contradictory. Ted Cruz, for example, has endorsed both a consumption tax and a “flat” income tax (Mike Huckabee is the one consistent consumption tax proponent). Rand Paul, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal have all indicated support for a flat income tax. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have spoken of a flat income tax as a “goal.”
The political motive for such talk, or at least so I think, is to do two things: first, it offers an alternative, less unseemly way of talking about upper-income tax rate reductions, and second, it sneakily scratches the itch of conservative “base” anger at the “lucky duckies” who are too poor to pay income taxes under the current system.

The other thing about “flax tax” ideas is that they aren’t going to happen, less because Democrats oppose them than because the numbers don’t add up and/or half the population would get openly and egregiously screwed. But that doesn’t stop the gabbing about them.

I’m second to no one in warning against wishful-thinking claims that the Christian Right (or for that matter, its Siamese Twin, the Tea Party) is dying or losing influence. But it does appear these folks are in a strategic muddle that could limit their impact on the 2016 Republican nominating contest, as I speculated at Washington Monthly:

One emerging irony of the 2016 GOP presidential nominating cycle is that the Christian Right may have too many options for its own good.
There are no likely candidates who dissent–as did, say, Rudy Giuliani in 2008–from the Christian Right’s core positions. So far, there’s no one who will even criticize the Christian Right–as did John McCain back in 2000 when he gave a speech comparing Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Meanwhile, there are two probable candidates that did extremely well with this constituency in past presidential contests (Huckabee in 2008, Santorum in 2012), another who had sizable elite Christian Right support during the brief period he was viable (Rick Perry), two who are egregiously pandering and panting for such support right now (Cruz and Jindal), and one who for all his shortcomings in their eyes, is still closely associated with one of the emotional high points of recent Christian Right history, the Terri Schiavo affair. There’s not much Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have done to offend these people, though they may be disliked for other reasons.
But while nobody can ignore or diss Christian Right voters or their actual or self-designated leaders, their very prosperity within the GOP makes it less likely they can have the impact on the contest some want. Indeed, as Trip Gabriel shows at the New York Times today, Christian Right leaders are deeply divided over whether it makes sense to unite around a particular candidate, and almost certainly even more divided over the identity of their champion if they had one. War horses like Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer and Richard Viguerie are scheming to force some sort of collective decision. But others aren’t buying it:

Some on the Christian right remain skeptical of the effort to settle on a single socially conservative candidate. Similar attempts in 2008 and 2012 collapsed because no consensus was reached, they say. And it is unclear what impact an endorsement by national social conservatives would have on a primary competition that will probably be driven by gobs of outside money, debate performances and long months of retail campaigning.
“I think it’s a useless process,” said David Lane, who arranges expenses-paid meetings of conservative pastors to hear from potential candidates, most recently at a gathering in Des Moines where Mr. Cruz and Mr. Jindal spoke. “My goal is to give the constituency access to candidates, then let them decide.”

You could call this a portfolio strategy, I suppose. But Lane is also at the center of another dispute among Christian Right folk, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, following Sarah Posner’s analysis: one between old-school culture warriors like Lane and a new breed of quieter leaders focused on less abrasive advocacy for the defensive-sounding “religious liberty” cause.

Now while these complicated dynamics may well splinter the Christian Right during the Republican primaries and limit their leverage if not their influence, there’s nothing about what I’ve written that suggests they will not overwhelming support the GOP presidential nominee, with varying degrees of pandering required to get them to take on the party yoke again depending on that nominee’s identity. This remains an important Republican faction, even if it cannot get it together to dictate a presidential nominee.

A lot of Democrats seem to think making seniors think about Medicare every time they are asked to think about any social programs is a silver bullet. This is why some Democrats did and still do think “Medicare for All” is the right model and message for universal health care, and why others think Republican efforts to play off Obamacare against Medicare are obviously absurd.
But there’s a problem with this approach, as I wrote about here at TDS in 2011, and discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

At TNR Danny Vinik takes a long look at a provocative new Brookings Institution report that indicates support among African-Americans and seniors for “government redistribution” programs has been declining gradually for decades. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Vinik’s article, and probably even more in the report. But I want to zero in on one point that some of us have been trying to make for years to Democratic strategists who think Medicare is the perfect model for every social program:

Democrats can learn a lot from the elderly’s declining support for redistribution. As [the report’s authors] note, it’s a bit strange that the elderly have become less supportive of government health insurance. “One might ask how,” they write, “by the end of our sample period, seniors can be less supportive of the idea that government cover medical bills given that they, uniquely, are categorically entitled this coverage.” There’s a simple explanation: Seniors don’t think the government helps them pay for health insurance. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 93 percent of Americans over the age of 65 said they don’t receive a government subsidy to pay for health insurance. (Nearly all seniors receive a subsidy via Medicare.)

Ding! Ding! Ding! Jackpot! Democrats are forever trying to suggest that senior think about their Medicare benefits when forming opinions about “the social safety net” or “redistribution” or the moral qualities of Big Government. But to a remarkable extent, seniors view Medicare (like Social Security) as an earned benefit–a literal entitlement. In part that’s because, as Vinik notes, they erroneously think their own payroll deductions and premium payments finance their benefits (actually nearly one-half of Medicare benefits come from general revenues). But they also distinguish themselves from those people on welfare by virtue of considering themselves entitled to a comfortable retirement via a lifetime of work. This is why so many of them can simultaneously bridle at Republican efforts to reduce or means-test Medicare benefits while opposing similar benefits for others.

This is why making a moral and economic case for social programs targeted to poor and sick people–including Obamacare and the Medicaid program it builds upon–is essential. Just saying to seniors “everybody should get the same benefits you’ve been given” will make many of them furious.