The Man of Steele

Most of the coverage of Michael Steele has focused on the prospect of increasing diversity in the republican party. what apparently has been lost in the shuffle is that he is not a good political strategist. his take on the stimulus bill is classic for how short sighted it is.

"[T]he goose egg that you laid on the president's desk was just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful."

Steele apparently lives in the same bubble that all house gop members live in where hoover is king. Steele lives in a world where factual evidence is completely and totally ignored. For example,

Steele couldn't praise [House Republicans] enough, and at times, he was at a loss for words. "You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government -- federal, state or local -- has never created one job," he said. "It's destroyed a lot of them."

Putting aside the fact that Steele was at one point the Lt. Gov of Maryland, someone actually employed by the government, to claim government does not create jobs is insane. The basic essence of a job is being paid to do something. The government pays millions of people to do things. When we buy military supplies or pencils we need someone to make those and the government is enabling their employment with those contracts. The entire military is employed by the government. Marine, Sailor, Fighter Pilot, all are government jobs.

I would like to give Steele the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant something that makes sense but really i dont know what it is. the traditional conservative argument is that the private sector is the most efficient and best creator of jobs not that government is incapable. apparently steele's leadership is taking them to the next level.

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cabinet diversity

There has been significant uproar over the "diversity" of Obama's cabinet picks. There are those complaining about a lack of southerners or light skinned african americans or any number of other things. My outlook on this is that there are too many different regions and skin colors and backgrounds for Obama to account for them all. We want him to be selecting for excellence and competence. We dont really want him to look for the best asian person or african american for a job we want him to look for the best person possible for the job.

I really doubt obama is someone who is going to be selecting a lily white cabinet or discriminating against anyone who is lgbt. There is plenty of diversity as far as the view points and politics of the cabinet posts go. From Republicans to progressives Obama is filling out every view in between. There is no point in asking for regional diversity or any of the other things people are clamoring for.

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Faith in Politics

I question the value of employing faith based social outreach on tax payers dollars. It strikes me that the ability to be even handed in the dispensention of funding for religious orgs is going to be very complicated. I am very skeptical that non-christian groups are going to be reciving the same rate of funding as the christian groups.

Barack Obama is a very religious man. He is very supportive of faith based groups and its not particularly surprising considering his work as a community organizer. He is on record as supporting these groups only so long as they do not proselytize or try to recruit followers with the money given to them by the government. what are the chances that this holds true in practice? not very high i would think. Sure a church group can deliver food to the homeless and provide other much needed social services but there will always be a religious affiliation there. Can you really take the religion out of churches activities?

The outreach also provides a problem of oversight not found in secular relief or social organizations. There needs to be an added level of oversight to assure that the money is not going to fund the church's religious activities. That creates added bureaucracy and seems like a rather unnecessary hassle when we could just avoid dealing in faith based groups.

there are going to be situations where it appears that the only people willing to step in is a church. this is illusory though because as long as the incentive is provided a different group will spring up to fill the void. These groups that work with social ills are not doing this for profit but they need to be financially viable directing aid to other groups could most likely solve an situation where it appears a church is the only answer.

When the government gets into religion everything gets messy and complicated. This is a country where religion is supposed to be absent from government and faith based orgs receiving federal funding just does not seem to work with that.

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Obama Should Govern From the Left

As the prospect of an Obama victory becomes more likely many commentators are feverishly penning articles that demand Obama respect, (1) this is a center right country, (2) everyone is really just voting against Bush, (3) "bi-partisanship", (4) the dangers of liberal over-reach. All of these arguments are designed to do one thing, make sure that Obama does not actually govern as *Gulp* a liberal. Obama was never going to be a kucinich or sandersesque leftist but he is solidly left of center and, apparently, this is very scary. There is no reason for him to hide his non-conservativeness or govern in a manner other than that which he promised to govern. Obama has promised to govern from the left and it is the correct thing to do.

What has Obama promised to do?

Favoring aggressive action to control greenhouse-gas emissions, he is open to considering nuclear power and has explicitly credited Republicans for promoting market-oriented approaches to environmental problems (and he has attracted the scorn of some on the left for doing so). A sharp critic of No Child Left Behind, he has spoken favorably about merit pay for teachers. Offering an ambitious health care plan, he would not require adults to purchase health insurance. His goal is to make health care available, not to force people to buy it--a judgment that reflects Obama's commitment to freedom of choice, his pragmatic nature (an enforcement question: Would those without health care be fined or jailed?), and his desire to produce a plan that might actually obtain a consensus. And, while he would raise taxes on the very richest Americans, he is hardly anti-business; indeed, he proposes to eliminate the capital gains tax for start-ups and small companies.

and for another take,

He’s running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall.

Is it really the suggestion of the arguments in the intro that Obama not follow through on these proposals? I think that to make the case that Obama should not actually do the things he has promised requires a stronger evidential showing than has been produced so far. In order to prevent Obama from enacting his promised initiatives we would need clear and convincing evidence that the American public is not supportive of them. I don't see that evidence.

Let's look at one issue in particular that many of the people who make claims about "bi-partisanship" want to see both sides get together and work out a new plan and not the one Obama campaigned on. If we look at two recent polls on the issue we find first a CBS News/New York Times Poll. Sept. 12-16, 2008 where 50% of respondents support fundamental changes and 35% support complete overhaul. To give some direction to this fundamental change we can gauche the attitudes of voters on universal coverage. On this topic an ABC News/Washington Post Poll from June found 66% supported coverage for all even if it meant an accompanying tax increase. Obama's position where he advances coverage without ending the employer based system fits squarely into the majority opinion in these two polls. Clearly people want the type of reform Obama is offering. If Obama's position already has solid majority support why should he let it be watered down and altered?

This finding is not limited to health care alone. A brand new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll found that when asked, "whether you agree or disagree with each of the following candidates on the issues that matter the most to you" 60% of them agreed that Obama is in alignment with them on the issues matter. If you do not like a poll as a basis for governing then consider that on Tuesday we have an actual election with the goal of deciding who we want to lead the country.

Elections are to determine the direction we want our country to go in. Voters have a choice between McCain and Obama and their myriad different policy positions. Some have argued that this election is not a ratification of Barack Obama and his policy choices at all but a simple repudiation of Bush. This argument makes the fundamental mistake of distinguishing Bush from the actions of the party which he lead. The Republican Party controlled every branch of government from 2000-2006. During that time frame we did not see the Republicans in either the house or the senate standing up to Bush and opposing the governing decisions that the American people are rejecting. The Republicans never sought to regulate the banking industry, the never sought to close Guantanamo, they opposed withdrawal from Iraq, they opposed S-CHIP, they were more than willing to support Alberto Gonzalez and the politicization of the DOJ. Bush was supposed to be the standard bearer for the conservative movement and his presidency will be the biggest failure in American History and the Republican party has held his hand all the way down.

The general point is that the American people are rejecting the failure of the Republican party in governance. If you really dont want to connect that failure to an ideological issue fine, but realize that there policy attitude has not changed. They will continue to advocate the same failed policy proscriptions without cleaning up the mess left behind by Bush. This will make working with them nearly impossible. Why would a President Obama compromise with the group that lead us headlong into this mess and refuses to change? Make no mistake the Republican's left in Congress after this election will not be the most moderate and interested in helping a president Obama.

So what does the political world look like on Wednesday if the gurus at ABC News are right? They all announced their guesses Sunday morning, and the average of their projections is 352 electoral votes for Obama plus a pickup for the Democrats of 24 seats in the House and 7 or 8 seats in the Senate.

If this happens, the upshot is that both parties get moved to the right. Most of the Democratic pickups will be in centrist states and districts, which will move the Democratic caucus moderately toward the center. At the same time, it will remove these centrist states and districts from the Republican side, which will make the GOP caucus not just smaller, but even more conservative than it is now. As a touchstone, the Republican Study Committee, the hardcore conservative wing of the House GOP contingent, currently represents a little over half of their total strength. After Tuesday they're likely to represent nearly two-thirds, which means that the rump of the House Republican caucus remaining after Tuesday is likely to be almost entirely in the hands of the most faithful of the movement conservative faithful. These true believers are not likely to give in quickly to the notion that hardcore conservative ideology needs a bit of freshening up if the party wants to regain its competitive edge. On the contrary, they'll probably double down, convinced that they lost only because John McCain and George Bush abandoned the true faith that America truly yearns for.

It is hard to image that the American people really want a president Obama who caves to the people who represent the exact thing they threw out of office. The American people want competency and success after eight long years of failure. That means simply delivering on what Obama has promised them. If Obama takes his plans, ratified and supported by the voting public, and executes them every thing will be fine. If instead he tries to moderate them and fails then his ideological background or governing from "the center" will be meaningless in the eyes of voters. We know the conservative plans don't work so why would we continue to use them? Obama should go with his natural instincts, left of center governance.

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Institutional Failure

The bailout is such a rich source of data for any political scientist or civics lover. I wrote yesterday on the bailout as it related to the job of the individual congresspeople in either a capacity as representatives or as a function of direct democracy. Today i think the focus should be on the institutional side of things and how the bailout is really a failure of the model on which our government sits.

I was going to cover this any way but i saw the ezra klein post on it and he had some very good points.

...my hunch is it was a victory for the system. We have a political structure biased against Big Things (this is less true when it comes to foreign policy). Blocking change is far easier than passing it. Health care fails, and so does cap and trade and Social Security privatization and immigration reform and bailout bills and most major initiatives. Doing big things slowly is almost impossible. Doing them very fast is similarly tricky. A lot of the theoretical reasons are well-explained in Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts paper, "It's The Institutions, Stupid." But it's a lesson worth remembering. In any large scale initiative, the odds are against success.

That's one reason most bills come out so badly: if the Democrats could just pass health care or a bailout bill, they'd simply build the bill they wanted to pass, and it would be clean and ideologically coherent. They'd respond to the financial crisis much as the Swedish did, with a plan for nationalization. On health care, they'd shoot for single payer. Instead, they need the president, and a bill that doesn't trigger a filibuster in the Senate, and to attract all sorts of House members who have little to fear from party discipline as the system is regional and entrepreneurial and fractured rather than parliamentarian. This is why I argued yesterday that what we're seeing is bigger than the bailout. No one quite knows how to harness our political system in opposition to major problems. No one knows how to get real health reform through, or pass a global warming bill that could actually avert catastrophe, or shepherd a capital infusion that will avert possible economic collapse. Those problems are all different, to be sure, with different coalitions and different messaging strategies, but much of what blocks action is structurally similar. When it comes to the American political system, you can almost never believe in change.

It is not a new or novel point. Our system is designed to be conservative. Bush might like the theory of the imperial presidency but really it does not fit into the model design for our government. Our system is supposed to prevent rapid change. When originally drafted the entire purpose of the senate was to prevent the rabble in the house from moving to fast or being carried away with some idea for rapid change. One person can hold up everything in the senate.

The congress is supposed to be able to check the power of the president with the power of the purse, the judiciary checks congress and the president through the review of constitutionality of laws and actions. The president checks the congress through his role as the head of executive agencies and the veto power. The system is designed to have numerous delays and bottlenecks in it.

The plurality system of elections is going to lead to a stable two party system according to the spatial model of elections. It is hard to imagine that the balance of power ever gets to out of equilibrium for too long. The parties should roughly split the electorate with a small middle who vacillate back and forth. Of course that all depends on rational actors.

So when ezra talks about the system being biased against big things he is totally correct. It is generally just not possible for one side to totally ran something through without the help of some of the other side. The problem is that one side sees everything as a political issue. Because of this politicization of every major crisis and the nature of the system one side may hold the issue hostage, bog it down, kill it, if it so chooses. This is especially true on the biggest issues and challenges where the legislators have to take some risk. the process becomes more delicate and more easily upset.

So it has become a case where the gop and house republicans can obstruct change and big ideas because the system is designed to be conservative in that nature. Whether they should do it is a totally separate question. Leaving it up to them to be adults and not to blow up the process and instead to do things for the good of the country is asking a lot.

The conservativeness of our system is also embedded in its stability. We run everything on a clock. You get a set number of years in the position and then we have elections and you get that number again. It is predictable and stable and allows for people to do what they want in the period of time between elections. It prevents the italian style failing of every government every two weeks. that would be bad. It also limits our ability to choose new leaders in a crisis or throw out failed ones when it becomes clear they have failed. We have to wait for the clock to run out.

Instead of bush lingering in office and draining confidence in a solution he would be out. He would have been out a long time ago. Instead we are like a ship that sees a big set of rocks ahead but has a rudder to small to turn out of the way. Everything was good in calm seas but when decisive action is needed to avoid catastrophe we have issues.

Until we become a more dynamic system big ideas and radical change is always going to face big opposition. That is why the shock doctrine is so key. There is a window of opportunity in crisis where big ideas can get through but once it closes or the idea fails the going becomes very tough.

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