Donald Carr, a senior policy and communications advisor for the Environmental Working Group, has a post up at HuffPo that should cause considerable squirming among Republican critics of big government, a substantial number of whom have been funneling millions of taxpayer dollars into subsidies to agribusiness. Carr explains in “Will Farm Subsidies Be the Tea Partiers’ Achilles’ Heel?“:

A wide swath of leading conservative and libertarian organizations, pundits and thinkers are no fans of the farm subsidy system: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, just for starters. Even Glenn Beck called for severely limiting farm subsidies just weeks ago on his Fox News program.
When conservative thought leaders decry the billions of federal dollars that ensure profits for the largest growers of corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans as a glaring example of wasteful government spending — you might think politicians who call themselves conservative would hear the music.

If you think this means government-bashing Republican office-holders would be railing against the Big Ag give-aways, you would be wrong, very wrong. As Carr notes,

But right now, there seem to be plenty of Tea Party-favored candidates who willingly collect government assistance in the form of farm subsidies. In early April, the Washington Post reported that Stephen Fincher, a Tea Party Senate candidate from Tennessee, was facing criticism over his acceptance of farm subsidy payments, as is Indiana Senate candidate Marlin Stutzman. Michele Bachmann’s farm subsidies have opened her up to charges of hypocrisy for her limited government stands.
The situation is similar with members who flaunt their success at steering government money to their home states and districts. In March, at the height of the heath care debate, nine Republican senators sent President Obama a letter decrying his proposed cuts to lavish farm subsidy programs. The senators who signed the letter were Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), senior Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Pat Roberts (Kan.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), James Risch (Idaho), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and David Vitter (La).

Of course the GOP politicians will be quick to describe the multi-billion dollar give-aways as much-needed help for family farmers, which is a shameless lie.

You call this a “safety net?” The data show that the vast majority of the subsidies defended by the nine senators go to the largest and wealthiest plantation-scale farm operations in the country. In 2009, the top 10 percent of the largest farm recipients in America collected 74 percent of all farm subsidies. At the same time, according to the USDA, 62 percent of farmers — nearly two thirds — received no payments whatsoever.
Keep in mind that the farm economy has been white hot compared to other economic sectors. USDA projects that farm income will rise by 12 percent in the next year, following a decade that produced the five highest years ever for farm income. But agriculture’s bipartisan appetite for taxpayer money is insatiable. …

Carr points out that some Democrats have joined in supporting the subsidies. But it’s not Democrats who are doing all of the self-righteous bellowing about the evils of unmerited government spending while doling out billions in corporate welfare to Big Agriculture, which returns the favor in campaign contributions. Carr has opened up a big can of GOP hypocrisy here, and Democratic candidates should not hesitate to make the most of it in their midterm campaigns.

When you read as much stuff on politics as I do, there’s an odd sort of exultation when you spot something so very poorly reasoned that you can spend many pleasurable hours tearing it apart. It helps when the author of such a “pinata” (i.e., it can be hit from just about any direction) is arrogantly or angrily wrong, stamping his or her feet at the very necessity of having to explain obvious truths that are anything but obvious or true. That’s why, on doctor’s orders, I only allow myself to read Peggy Noonan’s columns, so predictably full of rich manure, now and then.
Today the famous pollster and sometimes-Democratic, sometimes-strategist, Mark Penn, has published an op-ed in the Washington Post that is Noonan-esque in its strongly-held folly. You can read the whole thing, but basically, Penn is saying that the vast uptick in independent voter sentiment in this country is creating a good environment for a centrist third party that’s socially liberal and economically conservative, and Penn points to the rise of the UK’s Liberal Democrats as an example of what could happen here.
As Jon Chait notes in his own demolition of Penn’s column, the first contention is demonstrably wrong, though it appears it will take wooden stakes to kill it:

In fact, pollsters and public opinion experts — a group that apparently excludes Penn — understand that independent self-identification largely reflects a desire not to be seen as a closed-minded, automatic vote. It does not, however, reflect actual voting independence. Most self-identified independents are at least as partisan in their voting behavior as self-identified Democrats or Republicans. It’s largely a class phenomenon, with wealthier and more educated voters being more likely to call themselves independent, but not more likely to go astray in the voting both. The rise of independent self-identification has little to do with voters moving toward the center or the parties moving toward the extremes. Plenty of those self-identified Democrats in the 1950s voted for Ike.

In other words, actual as opposed to professed independent political behavior–i.e., ticket-splitting–has regularly decined now for decades, as has the percentage of the electorate made up of “true” independents. So there is no ripe uncaptured constituency out there, and to the extent that it even exists, it’s ideologically polyglot, not a “centrist” coalition ready for the taking. Many self-professed “independents,” as we’ve seen once again in the Tea Party Movement and in elements of the Left disgruntled with Obama and before him with Bill Clinton, are more ideological than self-professed partisans. Maybe they’ll vote, and maybe they won’t, but they are not combinable in some sort of third-party impulse.
More importantly, as Penn does acknowledge, there are powerful institutional barriers to the rise of third parties. But in noting the failure of the last two major efforts (John Anderson’s in 1980, and Ross Perot’s in 1992 and 1996), Penn simply says they failed because neither leader was “dynamic” enough. Perhaps, as some observers will undboutedly conclude, Penn’s column is really a public valentine to some very rich person (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) who might look in the mirror and see the leader “dynamic” enough to succeed where so many others, including reasonably dynamic people like Teddy Roosevelt, have failed. But in any event, Penn’s case for the viability of a third party totally depends on his analysis of the “centrist” and “independent” electorate, which is bogus to begin with.
Perhaps sensing the weakness of his case (or just looking for a news “hook”), Penn then hauls in the Liberal Democrats in an effort to divine some sort of transatlantic movement. You wouldn’t know if from his account, but far from being a “new” phenomenon, the LibDems represent a centuries-old political tradition (technically, the party represents a merger of the ancient Liberals with the Social Democrats, a splinter party that left Labour for many of the same reasons that Tony Blair and his associates found for reforming it a few years later). And it’s not exactly easy to match the Lib Dems to Penn’s template of “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” voters. Aside from “change,” they are for tax increases to reduce public debt, legalized same-sex marriages, major reductions in defense spending, liberalized immigration laws, and more aggressive participation in Europe. Their opposition to British entry in the Iraq War is probably the recent position with which they were most identified. Does this agenda sound “nonpartisan centrist” in any context that is transferable to America, or to Penn’s own agenda? Or more like the left wing of the Democratic Party, which Penn despises?
Moreover, “Cleggmania” aside, it’s very unlikely that the LibDems will make gains in their parliamentary representation that are in any way comparable to the share of the popular vote they receive today. And that’s in a country where the barriers to third parties are considerably lower than in the U.S.
I am not, as it happens, among the vast ranks of Penn-haters in the progressive blogosphere. I gave his last book one of its more favorable reviews. But the reality is that Mark Penn is largely frozen out of today’s Democratic Party elites thanks to years of intra-party combat and particularly his abrasive role in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Yes, he’s very wealthy and still has the juice, it appears, to command the op-ed pages of the Washington Post when he feels like it. The third party he describes as just over the horizon, however, is pretty much a party of one.

As you probably know, it’s Election Day in the United Kingdom, after a remarkably brisk but intense campaign. And it looks like it will wind up where it started, with the Conservatives likely to win a plurality of the vote and come close to a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. Whether or not there is technically a “hung parliament” (i.e., no majority for any one party) a sizable Tory plurality would very likely produce a government led by David Cameron. He’s already reportedly cut a deal with Ulster Unionists to forge a coalition if he falls just a handfull of seats short of a majority.
In any event, it’s been a memorable campaign, notable mostly because British politics finally followed the U.S. into a television-dominated competition of party leaders, not just parties. The three televised debates may not have changed the ultimate outcome that much, but probably did change the nature of campaigning and media coverage forever.
Here’s a link to Alex Massie’s suggestions for how you can best follow the returns and reactions.

Open Left‘s Chris Bowers comments on the limp Democratic turnout in yesterday’s primaries and urges the DNC to commission some polling to find out what’s behind it. Bowers notes, via Hotline on Call a disturbing decline in Democratic voters, compared to figures for the ’06 mid-term elections:

Just 663K OH voters cast ballots in the competitive primary between LG Lee Fisher (D) and Sec/State Jennifer Brunner (D). That number is lower than the 872K voters who turned out in ’06, when neither Gov. Ted Strickland (D) nor Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) faced primary opponents.
…in IN, just 204K Hoosiers voted for Dem House candidates, far fewer than the 357K who turned out in ’02 and the 304K who turned out in ’06.

Worse, the GOP turnout numbers were up dramatically, according to Hotline:

By contrast, GOP turnout was up almost across the board. 373K people voted in Burr’s uncompetitive primary, nearly 9% higher than the 343K who voted in the equally non-competitive primary in ’04. Turnout in House races in IN rose 14.6% from ’06, fueled by the competitive Senate primary, which attracted 550K voters. And 728K voters cast ballots for a GOP Sec/State nominee in Ohio, the highest-ranking statewide election with a primary; in ’06, just 444K voters cast ballots in that race.

Bowers notes that “This is more than just a demographic problem based on age–there really is a meaningful enthusiasm gap,” and urges the DNC to make a smart investment with some of the $30 mill it has pledged for mid-term GOTV this year:

…There are still no public, national polls looking for answers on why Democratic turnout is so low. All it would take would be to ask a single, open-ended question to 500 people who voted in 2008, but self-identify as unlikely to vote in 2010, “why don’t you intend on voting?” Everyone has theories, but those theories lack empirical supporting evidence…
…Surely, they could spend a little of that money on a transparent, representative, scientifically random, poll of unlikely voters of the sort I listed above. A lot of people are going to be working to try and improve turnout this year, and our jobs would be a lot easier if we actually knew what was motivating unlikely voters.

It’s a good idea. The DNC should take nothing for granted in budgeting midterm GOTV expenditures, and certainly not rely on unverified speculation about the specific reasons for the Dems’ mid-term voter enthusiasm decline.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
While it may take months to stop the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s not too soon to begin asking some questions about why it happened and what can be done to minimize the chance that something like this will happen again. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s terrific reporting last week, there are two important things we already know.
First, an oil-drilling procedure called cementing—which is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor—has been identified as a leading cause of well blowouts. Indeed, a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service (or MMS, the division of the Interior Department responsible for offshore drilling) found that this procedure was implicated in 18 out of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over the 14 years it studied—more than any other factor. Cementing, which was handled by Halliburton, had just been completed prior to the recent explosion. The Journal notesthat Halliburton was also the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea off Australia. While BP’s management has been responsive to press inquiries and relatively forthcoming as to its responsibility, Halliburton has refused to answer any questions—an all-too-familiar stance on its part.
Second, the oil well now spewing large quantities of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico lacked a remote-control acoustic shutoff switch used by rigs in Norway and Brazil as the last line of defense against underwater spills. There’s a story behind that. As the Journal reports, after a spill in 2000, the MMS issued a safety notice saying that such a back-up device is “an essential component of a deepwater drilling system.” The industry pushed back in 2001, citing alleged doubts about the capacity of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency backup. By 2003, government regulators decided that the matter needed more study after commissioning a report that offered another, more honest reason: “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.” I guess that depends on what they’re compared to. The system costs about $500,000 per rig. BP is spending at least $5 million per day battling the spill, the well destroyed by the explosion is valued at $560 million, and estimated damages to fishing, tourism, and the environment already run into the billions.
There’s something else we know, something that suggests an explanation for this sequence of events. After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.” On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”
So here’s my question: what is responsible for MMS’s change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?
It’s possible that my dark suspicions are baseless, and there’s no connection between the Bush-Cheney administration’s energy policy and the sad events of the past two weeks. But I’m just one guy with a keyboard reading documents and asking questions. I hope that some entity—public or private—with the needed staff and resources will do what’s necessary to get to the bottom of these questions. Before we even consider going forward with any more offshore drilling, we need some answers.

Results from yesterday’s primaries in Indiana, North Carolina and Ohio showed that on occasion the conventional wisdom is right.
Dan Coats did indeed win a Senate nomination in IN with an unimpressive (39%) percentage because the hard-core conservative vote was divided between Jim DeMint’s favorite, Marlin Stutzman (who finished second), and paleoconservative John Hostettler.
Lee Fisher did indeed parlay superior money, name recognition and endorsements into a fairly confortable (56/44) OH win over Jennifer Brunner.
And in NC, Elaine Marshall and Cal Cunningham are indeed headed for a runoff on June 22, with Marshall leading the first round a few percentage points short of the 40% threshold for outright victory. As expected, Ken Lewis ran third, though with a relatively strong 17%.
A PPP survey over the weekend showed Marshall leading a hypothetical runoff contest 43/32 with a quarter of the vote undecided. I guess we will see just how much money Cunningham’s friends in the DSCC are willing and able to raise to help him overcome that lead.
In House races, the closest thing to a real upset was in IN, where endangered incumbent Republican congressmen Mark Souder and Dan Burton narrowly survived. This disappointed journalists who had prepared “anti-incumbent mood” pieces in advance.
Rep. Larry Kissell pretty easily won his primary in NC, and zany self-funded conservative Tim D’Annunzio will be in a runoff in his effort to take on Kissell.
Next up on the calendar is Utah’s Republican State Convention on Saturday, which will determine the fate of endangered Sen. Bob Bennett, who may have fatally displeased conservatives by cosponsoring bipartisan health reform legislation. One of Bennett’s chief tormenters, Red State’s Erick Erickson, is already moving on to an effort to demonize the guy who appears to be running second ahead of Bennett in delegates, so it must not look good for the incumbent.

It’s primary day in three states, with a host of congressional and state legislative contests on tap, and three interesting Senate primaries, one on the Republican side (Indiana) and two on the Democratic (Ohio and North Carolina).
I’ve written previews of the Senate campaigns over at 538.com (here and here). The only pretty clear, easy-to-predict race is in OH, where Lee Fisher seems to be pulling away from Jennifer Brunner, having outraised and outspent her by nearly four-to-one; Fisher also has labor and DC support. In NC the race is likely to go to a runoff between long-time front-runner Elaine Marshall and the candidate recruited by the DSCC, Cal Cunningham, but watch out for the possiblity that Marshall will top 40% and end it tonight. Almost anything could happen in Indiana, though the general expectation is that John Hostettler and Marlin Stutzman will split the True Conservative vote and enable Dan Coats to limp into the general election against Brad Ellsworth. Coats would have a strong national wind at his back, but this may not be the best year for a candidate sporting a recent history as a DC lobbyist for big banks.
There are an assortment of interesting House primaries, most notably in IN, where longtime conservative Rep. Mark Souder, who violated a term limit promise, is in trouble against a self-funded car dealer, Bob Thomas. Another self-funding GOPer, NC’s Tim Annunzio, may be in the process of buying the nomination to face vulnerable Dem Larry Kissell, but Annunzio’s history of erratic behavior could make him non-viable in the general election (Kissell faces his own primary against Nancy Shakir, whose campaign has been fed by unhappiness with Kissell’s vote against health reform, but the incumbent is expected to win).
Turnout will be terrible in OH and NC, perhaps higher (on the GOP side at least) in IN. Stay tuned for analysis of the results tomorrow.
UPDATE: Take away the modifier “perhaps” before my suggestion that turnout in IN will be higher than in today’s other primary states. According to the IndyStar, turnout may be running ahead of 2006 levels, particularly on the GOP side, where the Senate primary is just one of a number of hot races around the state.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website will not gladden the spirits of Republican spin-meisters who argue that, as the public becomes more aware of the facts about the Affordable Health Care Act, polls will show an uptick in support for repeal of the act — and GOP congressional candidates. First, a plurality of poll respondents view the legislation favorably, as Teixeira explains:

…Consider these results from the latest Kaiser Health Tracking poll. First, the poll records a slightly more favorable (46 percent) than unfavorable (40 percent) reaction to the “new health reform law.” Thus, it is not the case that polls even now are uniformly showing unfavorable reaction to the new law.

And looking toward the very near future, Teixeira notes that, while a majority of voters say they don’t yet have enough information to understand how the law will affect them personally, the provisions scheduled to kick in this year are polling very well, indeed:

…Just 43 percent say they now have enough information to make this judgment, compared to 56 percent who say they don’t. Thus, more information could presumably make a difference to current feelings about the Affordable Health Care Act.
This is where the conservatives’ big problem comes in. There are a wide variety of changes that will take effect this year as a result of the law. Kaiser tested favorability to 11 of these changes, including “allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26” (74 percent favorable), “providing tax credits to businesses with fewer than 25 workers that provide health insurance to their employees” (86 percent favorable), and “making it harder for insurance companies to drop someone’s coverage when that person has a major health problem” (81 percent favorable). The average across the 11 changes was 73 percent favorable, with no change lower than 57 percent favorable.

As Teixeira concludes, “…As the public hears more about these changes and encounters them when interacting with the health care system, favorability toward the new health care reform law is likely to grow.” And, if the law’s beneficial provisions are well-publicized, GOP spin-doctors will be spinning their wheels more than anything else.

Even as Republicans try, somehow, to make the Gulf oil spill disaster “Obama’s Katrina,” the evidence of actual responsibility is pointing in a very different direction: right at former Vice President, Halliburton executive, and self-appointed czar of All Things Petroleum, Dick Cheney.
TDS Co-Editor William Galston has an important piece up on the New Republic site today marshaling the evidence for Cheney’s culpability for BP’s failure to utilize a device that would have largely prevented the disaster, which was required by federal authorities prior to 2003.

So here’s my question: what is responsible for the [Mineral Management Service’s] change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?

As Galston notes, it’s indisputable that Halliburton was responsible for the drilling process, known as “cementing,” that appears to have led to the Gulf spill, and to previous spills elsewhere. And it raises new questions about the conflicts of interest involved in the secretive energy policy process that Cheney set up as vice president, which really got into the weeds of the oil drilling business.
So let’s don’t hear any more about “Obama’s Katrina” until we’ve figured out whether the man who so often declared Barack Obama unfit for the presidency might have played a tangible role in making this disaster happen.

While Democratic unity is, given the objective circumstances, pretty well intact, there remains some serious progressive grumbling that the president and congressional Democrats are failing to take advantage of populist fury against the Washington status quo and reclaim the mantle of “hope and change.”
The esteemed progressive journalist Paul Starr has an article up on the American Prospect site arguing that the long-term policy results of Democratic policy initiatives should remain a higher priority than manuevering with the Tea Party Movement for the Angry Populist high ground.

Many progressives blame Obama, saying that he fell in with the wrong crowd in Washington and Wall Street, gave too much ground on policy, failed to mobilize his grass-roots organization, and lost his true voice, at least until the final weeks of the health-care battle when he barnstormed the nation and looked like the candidate the public elected in 2008.
Envious of the Tea Party’s angry crowds, even saying they sympathize with them, these progressives yearn for Democrats to express that same populist anger — but to direct it against the big banks and other corporations….
But there are good reasons why Obama cannot and should not indulge in a full-bore populism that, in practice, would yield nothing but deadlock and disaster.

Starr contrasts Obama’s approach to that of Republicans in power, who pandered for votes with an unfunded and poorly designed Medicare prescription drug benefit precisely because they didn’t care about the real-life consequences. With Republicans now abandoning any real pretense of offering a practical agenda for the country, Democrats have the particular burden of being “the party of responsible government, [because] America needs at least one of those.”

[F]or all their limitations, the bailouts and other policies have put the economy back in gear. Growth has resumed, productivity is up sharply, and employers are beginning to hire. This is how recoveries look: The market anticipates change, while employment lags it. And because most people cannot yet see the fruits, Democrats are paying a price in public approval and may well pay one in November.
For the fall, Democrats could well use more tactical populism, and the battle over financial reform should provide plenty of opportunity for it. But their true hope lies in building a record as the party of responsible government. Let the Republicans drink the Tea Party’s brew. Progressives shouldn’t wish for the equivalent. Calm and intelligent leadership is ultimately a better formula for long-term public support.

With the current conservative surge relying heavily on record-high public distrust of government, Starr has a good point that running against government as inveterately corrupted by corporate influence is a potentially self-defeating strategy for the party of public-sector activism. Certainly government should be more progressive. But if people don’t believe government can govern effectively at all, it’s the irresponsbile anti-government party that will benefit politically.