This item, a response to the Demos-TDS forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Eric Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm specializing in state and local governments.
As Bill Galston notes in this forum’s lead-off essay, “The public’s evaluation of both competence and integrity are shaped to some degree by its perception of government as steward of public institutions and public funds.” Patrick Bresette presents this problem as almost a Catch-22, in that progressive attempts to root out waste only reinforce public perceptions of government as wasteful. Writing of the Clinton-Gore National Performance Review (NPR), he bemoans that “[t]he media’s attention to the efforts of the initiative – and thus the public’s attention – focused on all the most egregious examples of wasteful spending that were being uncovered – from outrageously overpriced ashtrays, toilet seats and hammers to overlapping and duplicative governmental agencies and processes.”
Nevertheless, as Bresette observes, the NPR was part of an overall revival in Clinton Administration fortunes – and public trust in government – during the final six years of the Clinton presidency. I have seen similar results at the state and local levels, where I have overseen comprehensive performance reviews of government spending modeled on the NPR in seven states and helped governors in a half-dozen others to develop budget plans based on the principles discussed in this article.
This is not as dichotomous as it might seem: Revealing waste in government might increase public cynicism, but doing so also increases public confidence in the politician doing so, especially if that politician is a Democrat. The opinion research by John Halpin and Ruy Teixiera supports this argument, finding extremely high public responsiveness to an agenda of “[e]liminating inefficient programs and redirecting support to the most cost-effective programs” and like initiatives as a prelude to further progressive policies.
As both Galston and Bresette observe, Clinton and Obama rose in public esteem when they were able to convey the message that they were centrists or a “different kind of Democrat” and sank when they appeared otherwise. Clinton, according to Galston, floundered when he became embroiled in the flap over gays in the military – and, I would argue, when he decided to pursue health care reform before welfare reform – and Obama lost ground when he shifted his focus from economic recovery to the health care issue. This makes clear that the effect of fiscal responsibility on faith in government – and in those governing – also is closely related to Galston’s “third key determinant of trust in government”: responsiveness. “If people feel that the government is listening to them and working on the problems they think are most important, trust tends to rise. In recent decades, the public has come to view the federal government as much less responsive to their needs and preferences than it should be.” Conservatives have exploited the perception that Obama hasn’t been working on the right problems, focusing, instead, on bailing out banks and pursuing a health care reform that liberals cooperated in presenting as primarily transferring huge subsidies to the poor rather than lowering costs for all. As Thomas Edsall argues, this critique has fed on voter fears that limited resources were being taken from them and given unfairly to others.
Whether that constitutes a politics of selfishness, defined largely by racial and generational warfare, as Edsall warns, is debatable, however. In polling and focus group research throughout the 1990s in which I was able to participate as an advisor to various gubernatorial and Senate candidates, I found Americans amazingly receptive to paying for government programs to help needy Americans – such as education, job training, family counseling, child support, and transportation – if and when convinced of their effectiveness and efficiency.
A related concern is decline in the ideal of a shared social fate, as cited, for instance, by Bresette. It is often argued that shared commitment died when Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to ask not what they could do for their country, but rather, “Am I better off today than I was four years ago?” It is again debatable whether Americans have been this incorrigibly self-centered for the last 30 years; in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to tap successfully into a majority yearning for some sense of community. While public attitudes on this issue may shift in a complex relationship with the competence and integrity of political leadership, as Galston discusses, or the economic vicissitudes that preoccupy Edsall, one thing has remained constant since Reagan: The willingness of political leaders, both left and right, to indulge the notion that we can have it all and not pay for it.
It is tempting to see in this our political “leaders” simply catering to the public’s own immature desire to have things both ways. But it’s also just possible that the public is making a much more sophisticated demand – to have things a different way. Might it possibly be that the public expects its leaders to figure out how the public sector can actually deliver more in services, with more customer choice, and do it for less? Preposterous, except that the technological advances of the last few decades have allowed consumers to demand that the private sector do exactly that. Politicians’ failure to respond to the same imperatives with anything more than demagoguery or transparently vapid “reforms” might actually be a cause of public dissatisfaction, rather than simply the most advantageous political response to it. Perhaps a more honest and sophisticated approach to these issues might engender public support.

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President Obama is catching a lot of heat from progressive Democrats as a result of the budget deal averting a government shutdown (see here, here and here). But it appears he has bested the Republicans in the eyes of the public, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.
The poll, conducted 4/9-10, found that 54 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s handling of the budget negotiations, with 45 percent disapproving. Nearly half, 48 percent of respondents give Obama and Democrats more credit for the agreement, compared to 35 percent giving congressional Republicans more credit. (11 percent gave both credit, with 3 percent choosing “neither” and another 3 percent undecided).
Further, according to Steven Shepard’s ‘Hotline on Call’ report at The National Journal:

Notably, Obama scores better than congressional leaders from both parties. Equal majorities, 54 percent, disapprove of how leaders of each party handled the negotiations. In fact, House Speaker John Boehner now has an upside-down job approval rating: 41 percent of Americans approve of Boehner, while 43 percent disapprove.
Overall, a healthy majority, 58 percent, approves of the budget agreement. Just 38 percent of Americans disapprove. Majorities of Democrats (66 percent) and independents (56 percent) support the agreement, but Republicans are split virtually down-the-middle, with 47 percent approving of the agreement and 49 percent disapproving of the deal.

Not that the public likes all the GOP budget cuts — 65 percent favored continued funding for Planned Parenthood. An even larger majority, 71 percent, wants continued funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and its efforts “to enforce regulations on greenhouse gases and other environmental issues,” with just 28 percent in favor of preventing the EPA from funding enforcement. As for implementing the new health care act, 58 percent want the government to fund implementation, with 41 percent opposed.
In all, 31 percent of self-identified Democrats said President Obama and the Democrats “gave up too much” in the negotiations, while 63 percent said they did not. For independents, the figures were 16 percent agreeing that Obama and Dems gave up too much, with 77 percent disagreeing.

Anyone interested in the history of the Christian Right–and given its continuing power in the conservative movement and the GOP, that should include readers of this site–is encouraged to take a look at my latest book review for the Washington Monthly. It’s a review of From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, by Purdue University historian Darren Dochuk.
It’s a complicated book, but well worth the effort. Dochuk convincingly argues that much of what later became the Christian Right was first incubated not in the Deep South, but among southern transplants in the Los Angeles area. In the cultural maelstrom of southern California in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, an impressive array of evangelical ministers who combined rigidly conservative theology and politics with a highly adaptive institutional style pioneered a variety of innovations that later “went national,” including close cooperation with corporate leaders, joint Protestant-Catholic initiatives, parachurch organizations, school textbook and curriculum wars, the “Jesus Movement,” neo-pentecostalism, and even megachurches. All this happened long before the southern-led Moral Majority organization helped elect the favorite politician of SoCal evangelicals, Ronald Reagan, as president.
Dochuk’s book is also a good primer on the post-WW2 history of La-La-Land itself, with its rapidly expanding defense industry, its land use battles, its labor and racial conflicts, and the search of many of its citizens–particularly white working-class migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas–for certainty amidst radical cultural and economic change.
You’ll learn a lot about California history, but even more, about California’s influence on the country as a whole, even now.

Despite congressional Republicans assurances to the contrary, last week’s budget deal, which jettisoned the tea party’s treasured anti-abortion measures, also weakens their leverage to force cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, according to political strategist Robert Creamer, in his HuffPo post on the topic.
The GOP cave on women’s health clinics, family planning — and Planned Parenthood was a result of recognizing that the public was against them 2-1 and that they needed to compromise at this stage to appear “reasonable.” But the main factor in forcing the comprise, according to Creamer, was their lapdog devotion to making the fat cats happy:

Most important for the future is the role of the real base of the Republican Party — Wall Street and Big Business. The Republican CEO caucus — and the Chamber of Commerce — are hell bent on destroying unions, shrinking the public sector, lowering tax rates for millionaires, etc.
Frankly, they could care less about the right wing social agenda. In fact, they view social conservatives as cannon fodder to win elections. And once they had gotten all that they could on the economic side, they were not the least bit interested in jeopardizing their political fortunes or the economy simply to advance the Tea Party agenda…Apparently the Chamber and the CEO class’s chief operative, Karl Rove, weighed in heavily against a Republican shutdown.
…The Republican House Budget Chairman, Paul Ryan has proposed…about $4.2 trillion of tax cuts over the next decade for corporations and the wealthy. In other words, Ryan has proposed pulling the plug on Medicare, Medicaid and food support in order to give tax breaks to millionaires.

So now the Republicans will put their declining leverage into their fall-back position to appease the Tea Party — a cap on federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product. As Creamer explains it,

Holding the debt ceiling increase hostage to their radical economic demands is pretty much equivalent to a radical suicide bomber threatening to blow himself and everyone else up, if they don’t agree to his radical religious demands.
…While the Wall Street/CEO Republicans really want to wring as much as possible out of Democrats in the way of less regulation, a smaller public sector and lower taxes for them, they are not likely to knowingly allow the Tea Party extremists to blow up the credit markets and the economy….And though the Republican political class would love for the economy to stagnate between now and 2012 — they certainly don’t want to be caught with their hands on the grenade pin if the economy blows sky high.

As Creamer puts it, “The deal that was struck last week demonstrated clearly that the CEO/Wall Street faction of the Republican Party — and its political elite — are not yet prepared to allow the inmates to run the asylum.”

If you are a progressive depressed by the concessions made on appropriations by the White House and congressional Democrats late last week, maybe it will help to read this assessment from the very influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson:

The most depressing bit of all of this is how quickly conservative pundits who promised they were to going to throw off the shackles of fidelity to the Republican Party after Bush and become again true conservative warriors for freedom have descended, automaton like, into guttural cheerleading for a Republican Party that just went from $100 billion in promised cuts to a third of that in actual cuts while selling out the unborn for roughly $1000 per murdered child assuming reports are true that they got the Democrats to increase cuts $1 billion in exchange for dropping the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Actually, I’d encourage a careful reading of this and similar posts by anyone who is under the illusion that a compromise over abortion policy is ever a lively possibility.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Along with a large and increasing number of Americans, I care about the long-term deficit because I think that, left unchecked, it will constrict and distort our future economy and society. And I am far from alone in believing that President Obama’s FY2012 budget proposal mostly evades the problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s recently released analysis, his proposal wouldn’t reduce the annual deficit below 4 percent of GDP, and the debt held by the public would double from $10.4 trillion to $20.8 trillion, nearly 90 percent of our GDP. That’s an outcome almost no one wants. To avoid it, we need to change course.
In these circumstances, you might imagine that I would welcome the budget plan House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released on Tuesday. I do not, because it spurns the only possible framework for an adult conversation between the political parties that could lead over time to a long-term fiscal agreement. We don’t have to speculate about the shape of that agreement. We saw one version of it in the report of the Bowles-Simpson commission and another in the report of the Domenici-Rivlin commission. We may well see a third if the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Six” can coalesce around an agreement. (Full disclosure: Maya McGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and I put out a fourth version last fall.)
By contrast, the Ryan budget represents the victory of the Tea Party mentality over mainstream conservatism within the Republican Party. It illustrates the inevitable and draconian consequences of a fiscal policy that excludes net tax increases and holds federal government spending to its historic postwar average. “Draconian” is more than the adjective du jour; it is the literal truth. CBO estimates that under Ryan’s proposal, the portion of the federal budget not devoted to mandatory health programs, Social Security, or interest on the debt would decline from 12 percent in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 31/2 percent by 2050. Does anyone think this is serious? Does anyone think this will happen? How many people–really, deep down–think it should?
There is an alternative approach that makes much more sense–economically, socially, and politically. Bipartisan discussions have converged on the objective of holding public debt to around 60 percent of GDP in 2020 through a balanced menu of spending cuts and revenue increases. While there are compelling economic reasons for not allowing the debt to rise as far as our current course would take it, only ideology requires it to disappear altogether. Nor is it necessary to hold federal spending to its historical level: All other things equal, the aging of the population and the rise in medical costs (even if slowed, as it should be, from the current rate) would suggest a somewhat higher level. The Galston-McGuineas proposal would hold spending to about 22 percent of GDP, higher than the postwar average but much lower than what the status quo would produce. Other bipartisan plans have ended up in roughly the same place.
But that’s the point: The Ryan plan is not bipartisan. (Given how skittishly House Republicans reacted to Ryan’s “Roadmap” last year, it remains to be seen whether it’s even mono-partisan.) If it’s the GOP’s best and final offer, it will be a conversation-stopper. It will be interesting to see how many contenders for the Republican presidential nomination calculate that they have no chance of winning the nomination of a Tea Party-dominated primary electorate unless they endorse the Ryan plan. One thing is pretty clear: Any Republican presidential candidate who embraces this plan will have committed general election suicide.
Ryan’s plan has one incontestable virtue: It recognizes, as do many analysts outside the conservative fold, that health care costs lie at the heart of our long-term fiscal problems. But the question is what to do about them. Turning Medicaid into a block grant to the states–a key Ryan proposal–is a genuinely bad idea, because it will lead inevitably to cutbacks in care for low-income people who have nowhere else to turn, contradicting Ryan’s own pledge of a “secure safety net.” Under his proposal, CBO estimates, federal spending for Medicaid would be 35 percent lower in 2022 and 49 percent lower in 2030 than currently projected. What are the odds that hard-pressed states could pick up the slack? And if not, how many poor children would go without without health care? How many elderly Americans without personal resources would go without decent nursing homes?

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So the federal government didn’t shut down, and the appropriations deal that was cut disappointed many Tea Party types (particularly those focused on defunding family planning) and probably even more progressives, with the latter being particularly upset by White House boasting over the level of spending cuts involved.
But just about everyone understands the bigger fight over the long-term budget is a much bigger deal, with the possibility of a rejection of a public debt limit increase being the hand grenade Tea Party allies are threatening to unpin.
This is the point at which tactical retreats by Democrats will stop making much sense. And for that reason, there is already heavy grumbling among Democrats about reports the White House is going to soon release plans for a deficit reduction strategy that includes “entitlement reform.”
The key thing to watch for is whether the administration consistently links changes in entitlement programs (sure to fall far short of the kind of toxic “reforms” being proposed by Paul Ryan) to tax increases for the wealthy. So long as they do that, and Republicans continue to oppose revenue increases as a theological matter, then talk of “betrayal” or “surrender” is simply wrong. Sure, many progressives prefer a different strategy based on out-front, unambiguous opposition to any change in entitlements. But that’s not the same as asserting that anything less is no strategy at all.

As you may have heard, the House passed a resolution yesterday extending funding for the federal government for another week, but with an immediate $12 billion cut (annualized, that would be some very serious money). The maneuver was universally interpreted as a meaningless gesture (guaranteed to die in the Senate) aimed at influencing how a government shutdown would be interepreted.
But without much attention, five House Republicans voted against the CR. Of those five, two are likely Republican presidential candidates, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul. And a third, Steve King, is considered an extremely powerful poohbah with respect to next year’s Iowa Caucuses.
King and Bachmann, who are very close allies in all things wingnutty, had publicly pledged to vote against any appropriations measure that did not kill off funding–even non-appropriated mandatory funding–to implement health reform. And Ron Paul votes against appropriations bills routinely.
But it’s a significant reminder that the logic of the Republican nomination campaign trail is different from the logic of even a remarkably conservative House GOP. You really can’t get too conservative in preparing to appeal to the hard-core party faithful at the ballot box.

With a government shutdown tonight now pretty likely, it’s as good a time as any to consider how Americans may react: not to a theoretical event, but to the real thing.
Yesterday Nate Silver had an important post on that subject, based in no small part on surveys showing that Americans are not thinking about politics much at all right now, and will experience a government shutdown as a nasty shock:

Washington is a political town 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, and the hamster wheel keeps turning even when the nation’s attention is focused somewhere else. When the public is less engaged with day-to-day politics, Washington acts as even more of an echo chamber, and politicians may conflate winning the support of elites with popular opinion.
This is mostly a warning, I suppose, to Paul D. Ryan and the Republicans. His proposed budget for 2012 includes a number of politically risky changes, including to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Mr. Ryan is probably not feeling that opposition in a visceral way yet — most voters don’t know who he is, let alone what his budget says. (Most voters don’t even know that Republicans control the House but not the Senate.) But the further Mr. Ryan and the Republicans take this proposal, the greater the risk of a backlash.
In particular, most voters are not expecting a shutdown, so if one were to occur, the political winds could go from being nearly still to gale-force in a hurry.

And those winds will not necessarily be driven by the sorts of micro-tweaks in political messaging coming out of Washington today, with both parties trying to deflect blame based on spinning every development.
The big picture this week is that Republicans, with the Tea Party folk howling at their back, are pushing big changes in the role of government in national life, including elimination of Medicare and Medicaid as they’ve traditionally operated. Democrats are resisting, though not that loudly. The government is shutting down over it all.
If I were a Republican, I would be very nervous about how this is going to play out, not in the news media but among Americans who have not been following any of the back-and-forth at all.

As policy wonks begin to stare more intensely at Paul Ryan’s budget “blueprint,” it becomes more obvious all the time that he’s aiming more at conservative policy prescriptions than at any sort of fiscal discipline. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be insisting on yet another tax cut for high earners (and for corporations), and a really big one at that.
Meanwhile, the claim that Republicans are risking a government shutdown because they are so concerned about levels of “government spending” is looking threadbare, too. At this point, it’s all about the appropriations riders, and mostly about killing off federal funding for family planning and for environmental protection.
Next time you read that the “Tea Party” is forcing John Boehner to go to the mats for “more cuts,” you should mentally add: “to programs and policies right-wingers don’t like.” It wasn’t about the money in Wisconsin, isn’t about the money with the long-term budget, and isn’t about the money on appropriations, either. When it is about the money, maybe we can talk, but for now, it’s just an effort to use fiscal concerns to take the country back to the 1960s or earlier.