While we are obviously in the midst of a national economic crisis, it’s equally obvious that some places and some categories of citizens are getting hit harder than others. But how will the geographical impact of the recession play out over time?
Well, the controversial but always stimulating urban theorist Richard Florida has some elaborate thoughts on that subject in a long cover article for The Atlantic. Some of his analysis unsurprisingly relies on his longstanding contention that places with high concentrations of “creative class” types will do well over the long run. But he offers some more specific insights that make a great deal of common sense.
Most notably, he points out that you can’t predict a given metropolitan area’s economic trajectory simply by shoehorning it into or out of a “troubled industry” category. Charlotte, for example, is a major banking center, which ought to spell trouble, but the consolidation of that industry through buyouts of near-bankrupt institutions may actually concentrate banking jobs there and get the city through the worst of the crisis. Similarly, the southern states sporting foreign car plants could obtain some relative benefit if U.S. automakers continue to struggle or go belly-up.
There are some cities, though, that have in the recent past fueled hyper-growth through locally determined economic factors that don’t auger well for the future. Florida mentions Phoenix and Las Vegas, whose growth explosions have been heavily dependent on construction, real estate, and retiree savings (Vegas, of course, also depends enormously on tourism, and thus national income and consumption trends) as places that may never quite be the same. To a large extent, their main growth industry was growth itself.
What the reader takes away from this article is that breezy generalizations about the regional impact of the crisis (which in turn helps determine its political impact) are often imprecise. Sure, the manufacturing centers of the Heartland are in deep, deep trouble, but Chicago, suggests Florida, is enough of a national and international center for professional services (and part of a “mega-region” that includes Toronto) that it could emerge even stronger. The most famous financial center of them all, New York, actually has a far more diversified economy than Des Moines, Iowa.
There’s a lot of other material in the article about things like the “metabolism” of various cities that reflects Florida’s earlier work, and is interesting if not self-evidently convincing. But it’s not too early to think about the reshaping of the country, and of the geographic and demographic trends we all began to take for granted over the last several decades, that will likely follow when the current crisis ends.

Open Left‘s Chris Bowers has a fun takedown of msm reports that term Gregg’s withdrawal a “blow” to Obama. Bowers is exactly right. The idea is pretty silly.
Yes, No-Drama Obama would rather have had all of his appointments go smoothly. But reasonable voters understand that there was no way to predict Gregg’s histrionics. Most U.S. Senators get it that cabinet secretaries are charged to carry out the President’s policies, as part of a team, not as unelected free agents doing their own thing. I remember being taught that in middle school civics class. Gregg’s realization comes a little late and invites ridicule.
Characterizing Gregg’s vacillations as a “blow” to the President, rather than the GOP, is also a stretch. More on point is this from the comments following Bowers’ post:

He’s shown the whole world what we in NH have always known – that Judd is all about what Judd wants…And he, the last major GOP figure in NH, has become the laughing stock of both parties.

and another:

Merits of the appointment aside, I don’t see how this is a “blow”; the public is left with the clear impression that Obama made yet another attempt to bridge differences with the GOP, only to be rebuffed…This doesn’t make him look bad; if anything, he looks magnanimous, and the GOP looks petty.

Well said. Like Obama’s bipartisan outreach efforts or not, his sincerity, goodwill and consistency in reaching out are not in doubt. Indeed, they are highlighted in contrast to his Republican adversaries.
The Gregg withdrawal may also recall memories of McCain’s erratic behavior concerning his decision to debate or not following the economic meltdown. That can’t be good for the GOP.
Especially given Ed’s point in his post yesterday about the importance of the Census, Gregg’s withdrawal is not unwelcome among Democrats concerned about strengthening our case for reforms. President Obama now has plenty of cover for nominating a strong Democrat to head the Commerce Department, and it would be a shame not to use it. In that regard, Larry J. Sabato’s contribution to a round-up on the Gregg withdrawall in today’s WaPo may prove instructive:

The Gregg withdrawal can be a watershed. It’s been a grand and noble experiment, but now the Obama administration should abandon aggressive bipartisanship. The president deserves great credit for reaching out to Republicans in Cabinet appointments, frequent consultation and some substantive compromise on the stimulus bill. President Obama read public opinion correctly: Americans want civil debate between the parties, and that aspect of bipartisanship should be continued.
Yet pleasantries should never be exchanged at the cost of an electoral mandate. Obama secured a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since 1860, save for Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Splitting the difference on issues of principle waters down his mandate and dilutes the changes his supporters expect him to deliver. We have a two-party system, not a one-party scheme, and the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans create clear choices for the electorate. Obama should succeed or fail based on enactment of the Democratic platform. Voters will be the judge of Democrats’ handiwork in 2010 and 2012. Leave “national unity” governments to parliamentary nations, and let the American two-party system work.

It may be that the President’s bipartisan outreach will get better results later on, after his Administration is more securely established. For now, Sabato’s argument makes sense.

Today’s surprise announcement by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) that he is withdrawing his nomination as Commerce Secretary has a lot of implications, large and small. But one thing is very clear: his withdrawal removes a potential threat to a well-conducted decennial Census in 2010.
Whatever his merits and demerits generally as a senator, Gregg has been a consistent enemy of efforts to let the Census Bureau conduct a count using anything like aggressive efforts to, well, count Americans. As a New York Times editorial observed when Gregg was first nominated:

The Census Bureau is a major agency within the Commerce Department, and the decennial census — the next one is in 2010 — is a mammoth undertaking. After years of mismanagement and underfinancing by the Bush administration, the bureau is so ill prepared to conduct next year’s count that Congressional investigators have warned that it is at high risk of failure unless corrective action is taken immediately.
Mr. Gregg was never a friend of the census. As chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Commerce Department’s budget, he frequently tried to cut the bureau’s financing. In 1999, he opposed emergency funds for the 2000 census requested by President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled House.

An accurate census obviously has a big political impact, given its impact on reapportionment of Congress and the fifty state legislatures. But it also has an enormous effect on all sorts of federal programs that distribute dollars based on census figures concerning the concentration of various population groups in various states and localities. And beyond government, the census is the most critical database for virtually every measurement of American society, in business, in the social sciences, and in journalism.
It’s not totally clear when the Obama administration decided to pair the Gregg nomination with a proposal to make the census director report directly to the White House. But Gregg’s own statement of withdrawal called the census issue one of the two problems–the other being the economic stimulus legislation–that kept him from moving forward with this nomination.
There will be plenty of time later to analyze why Obama made this flawed appointment. It doesn’t really matter, ultimately. But its withdrawal is good news for anyone who wants a fair and complete Census.

Via ThinkProgress, we learn today that the office of House GOP poohbah Eric Cantor has issued a statement dismissing President Obama’s commitment to “bipartisanship” as nothing more than a marketing ploy:

“Though the administration’s marketing of its bipartisan hard work has been outstanding, the actual work has been almost nonexistent,” said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

This is because, presumably, Obama and House Democrats did not give a whole lot of thought to accomodating the arguments of Cantor and other House Republicans that the entire thrust of the economic stimulus legislation was a terrible idea, involving “welfare” and “socialism,” that should be rejected in favor Bush-style across-the-board and corporate tax cuts, along with deregulation.
As one of the more consistent defenders of Obama’s brand of “bipartisanship” in the progressive blogosphere, I’d beg leave to make it clear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Eric Cantors of the political world. Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” means reaching out to the millions of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) around the country who may not particularly like or trust Democrats, but who generally accept the idea of direct government action to revive the economy and to deal with long-overdue national challenges like health care reform, climate change, regulation of the financial sector, and ridding Washington of the death-grip of pay-for-play special pleading by corporate interests. Some of them also don’t like a foreign policy that engages in unnecessary wars at the expense of our national interests. These are the people who have been fundamentally misrepresented–literally and figuratively–by congressional Republicans for years, a misrepresentation that looks likely to grow worse as GOPers convince themselves that Bush’s main sin was excessive “moderation.”
So in reaching out to these essentially disenfranchised Americans, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Obama to recognize the GOP pols who have disenfranchised them as their exclusive bargaining agents. I don’t fault him for going throgh the motions of “reaching out” to the Cantors of the world, because their predictable rejection of his overtures helps make his broader point. And in any event, anyone who thinks Eric Cantor gives a damn about “bipartisanship”–short of some sort of corrupt Washington power-sharing arrangement that repudiates the results of the last two national elections and the real-life results of Republican rule–hasn’t been paying much attention to the events of the last eight years.

In an example of how one person’s political crisis represents another person’s opportunity for grassroots democracy: An email from the National Jewish Democratic Council today offers a link to a site wherein you can go through various scenarios for Israeli party coalitions, and Build Your Own Government.
The site itself is in Hebrew, which could limit its usefulness to many American kibitzers. But the party lines are all color-coded.
Next time Barack Obama has to put together a coalition in the Senate to pass key legislation, a tool like this would be helpful.

Last Sunday, Open Left published a critique of an article we ran here at TDS – an article by Andrew Levison titled Obama the Sociologist. The critique, by Paul Rosenberg, is tough and argues its thesis with commendable energy and seriousness, but, at the same time, it also keeps the debate civil and clearly focused on the issues. In the coming months, as greater problems and tensions arise within the Democratic coalition and community, it is going to become more and more vital that Democrats maintain certain standards of respect and civility, even as they passionately debate policies and political strategies.
Specifically, here are three positive things that Rosenberg’s does in the course of his argument:

1. He assumes the writer he is criticizing is intellectually honest and doesn’t attribute ulterior motives. There are several places where Rosenberg explicitly notes that he has the opportunity to take a cheap shot, but chooses to give the author the benefit of the doubt instead.
2. He treats a debate between Democrats over political strategy as an attempt to identify both good ideas and bad ones and not as a contest whose goal is refute everything an opposing author says. At one point (referring to both Levison’s article and a related analysis by Mark Schmitt) Rosenberg says “I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful and have useful insights. But I believe both are colored by wishful thinking and have some very flawed analysis as well.” A strong disagreement is very clearly and firmly stated, but it avoids being rude or insulting.
3. He avoids criticizing a publication as a whole for the opinions expressed in a particular article. At one point Rosenberg says: “this is not an attempt to pick a fight, much less to position Open Left in opposition to The Democratic Strategist. Indeed, despite some differences with its initial analysis, I completely agree with the main thrust of another recent piece.”

This is an excellent starting point for a set of rules for how Democrats should debate amongst themselves. TDS supports these standards and hopes that the rest of the Democratic community – progressives, centrists, conservatives, whatever — will all follow Rosenberg’s lead.
(Note: The Author of Obama The Sociologist is developing an amplification of his original analysis that will appear in a few days)

A House-Senate conference committee has come up with what will probably be the final version of the economic stimulus package.
From scattered media reports, it looks like the “losers” in the negotiations will be first-time homebuyers and house-flippers who won’t get much of the Senate-passed tax credit for home purchases; and state governments, who will lose most if not all of the flexible federal assistance supplied in the House bill. The AMT “patch” in the Senate bill, that temporarily protects upper-middle-class taxpayers from a big hit on Tax Day, stayed in at a price of $70 billion.
There are garbled reports as to whether conferees did or did not scale back the Obama “Make Work Pay” tax credit, the centerpiece of his campaign’s tax plan.
The one thing that is reasonably clear is that the package will be enacted. The only Republican senator even threatening to leave the reservation after the Senate passed its bill, Arlen Specter, will have a hard time rejecting the conference report unless he’s willing to get deep in the weeds of the differences from the Senate bill. And we will soon see the Obama administration and congressional Democrats thumping the tubs for quick passage of the final bill.
THURSDAY MORNING UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Politically, there’s a lot of grumbling from House Democrats–both progressives unhappy with Senate-passed cuts and Blue Dogs who don’t like unfunded tax cuts–about the AMT “patch,” which survived conference intact (see this Tom Edsall piece for an assessment of the politics of this provision). But it’s unlikely to develop into a revolt on the conference bill itself.

Over at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston has published an article pointing to Ronald Reagan’s negotiation of an economic crisis and his subsequent landslide re-election as instructive for Barack Obama today.
In Galston’s take, Reagan overcame plunging approval ratings and a very difficult midterm election by constantly reminding Americans of the opposing party’s responsibility for the economic calamity, and its apparent failure to learn from it, and by sticking to his basic policy guns despite poor short-term results.
In some ways, Obama should find it easier than Reagan did to hold his predecessor responsible for the terrible economy, since a recession was well under way in Bush’s final year as president, and the financial collapse occurred on his watch. On the other hand, Reagan’s party did not have the sort of control of Washington (the House remained Democratic throughout his tenure) that Obama’s does, and even the Republican-controlled Senate rebelled against him on occasion (most notably in forcing a tax increase in 1982).
Generally, though, the parallels between Reagan’s political situation then and Obama’s now are indeed striking. And certainly Democrats hope to be able to say in 2012 that it’s “morning in America again.”

Yesterday’s elections in Israel can and are being spun in two different directions. On the one hand, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, which is committed to the pursuit of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, narrowly (and somewhat surprisingly) outpolled Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud, theoretically giving her the opportunity to form a government. On the other hand, right-wing parties as a whole gained strength, and the big winner was Avigdor Lieberman’s hyper-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which eclipsed Labor, the long-time governing party of the country, to become the third largest electoral bloc.
Today, in fact, Livni and Netanyahu are in hot pursuit of Lieberman’s support, since either leader can obtain the chance to put together a government with a majority of Knesset members on board. Lieberman’s party, among other things, favors the disenfranchisement of “disloyal” Israeli Arabs, and is adamantly opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
At present, there are three possibilities for Israel’s next government: a right-wing coalition led by Netanyahu (the most likely outcome); a Kadima-led coalition that includes Lieberman’s party (which would definitely come with a veto over any possible talks with Palestinians); or some sort of “centrist” coalition (presumably led by Livni) that includes both Kadima and Likud but excludes Yisrael Beiteinu.
Any of these three scenarios would likely paralyze any Israeli movement towards new negotiations with the Palestinians or with Syria, while increasing the odds of unilateral action towards Iran. Livni’s personal victory notwithstanding (and remember that she was until recently a Likudnik herself), the Israeli political center has clearly moved to the right by any meaningful measure. This is obviously not good news for the Obama’s administration and its aspiration to jump-start new land-for-peace negotiations.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

There is something inherently sad about reading a writer with a reputation for greatness and coming to the sudden, jarring realization that time and technology have inescapably passed him by. But that kind of conclusion is hard to avoid after reading Leon Wieseltier’s latest Washington Diary for The New Republic.
The centerpiece of his column is a complaint about an email he received from President Obama after the Inauguration. The crux of Wieseltier’s argument boils down to this: Obama’s rhetoric and the tools he uses to advance it are based on the premise that we are one nation, united with common purpose and goals, but we are in fact a splintered collection of people with divurgent views of reality and all Obama’s techological ‘networks’ only succeed in creating a veneer of actual connectivity.
The argument about our relative level of unification as a country seems silly knowing that close to three quarters of Americans approve of Obama’s rhetoric, and perhaps that’s why Wieseltier saves his real ire for the networks. Toward the end of the piece, he writes:

For one of [Obama’s] innovations in American politics has been the zealous adoption of the ideology of the network. To be sure, there were practical reasons: email and YouTube are cheaper than direct mail, and of course cooler–but direct mail is all they are. The number of people who can be reached in an instant is genuinely astounding–but this is a marketer’s dream, nothing more.

This statement is indicative of a fundmentally-flawed and outdated worldview.
If I were to guess, I’d bet that Wieseltier still pays for a newspaper subscription. Why does that matter? Because people who purchase print newspapers are readers.
People who read newspapers online, however, are users. Using tools built by the media outlets, we email articles to friends. We share op-eds on Twitter, react to news stories on blogs, and we post columns to Facebook.
People read direct mail. People use Internet communication.
We forward the emails that Obama sends to our family. We rate YouTube videos and then we post them to our personal websites. We react to everything, which in turn sparks a ‘national conversation.’
Compare that with offline communication. No one ever puts new postage on a piece of direct mail to send on to a friend.
And the remarkable thing about Obama and his staff is their ability to turn online communication into offline action.
Since the campaign ended, thousands of individuals have signed up to Facebook groups with the expressed intent of lobbying Congress to pass Obama’s recovery bill. This weekend, thousands of people attended ‘Economic Recovery House Meetings’ to discuss the president’s plan. Organizing for America tells that there were 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities in 429 congressional districts and all 50 states.
Try getting people to do that with a piece of direct mail.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist