Kevin Drum

Top Ten Bills

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| Tue Jan. 6, 2009 10:53 AM PST

TOP TEN BILLS....Over at Tapped, Tim Fernholz passes along summaries of the top ten bills the Senate Democratic leadership plans to introduce this month. It starts with S.1, the stimulus bill, and runs down through troubled mortgages, healthcare, climate change, education, immigration, and a few other things. The descriptions are mostly just placeholders and don't really say much, but it's still an interesting look at Harry Reid's priorities.

Perhaps what's most interesting, though, is what's not on the list: card check, forcing hedge fund billionaires to pay ordinary taxes on their income (possibly the biggest no-brainer legislation in recent history), military procurement reform of any kind, and serious financial regulation. That's not to say this stuff won't come later. But apparently it's not part of the Top Ten.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters think card check is implied as part of S.2. Maybe so. The wording seems awfully vague if that's really their intent, but we'll see.

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Bringing Us Together

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| Tue Jan. 6, 2009 10:24 AM PST

BRINGING US TOGETHER....The LA Times reports on Barack Obama's attempt to get wide bipartisan support for his fiscal stimulus package:

Despite Barack Obama's decision to include as much as $100 billion in business tax breaks to his economic stimulus package to woo reluctant Republicans, obstacles to speedy, bipartisan passage remain.

...."I think he would like to have a large bipartisan vote in favor of this package. And he knows, even before we mentioned it, that the way to do that is obviously for it to have elements that are appealing to Republicans," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after a 90-minute meeting that Obama held with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders Monday.

....At the same time, McConnell and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said they were not ready to endorse the overall stimulus proposal....House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), speaking after the closed-door meeting with Obama, said, "I think there would be a lot of support" for tax cuts among the GOP rank and file. But, he added, "we cannot afford to be burdening our children and our grandchildren with an extra trillion dollars in debt."

The more I read about this, the more perplexed I get. What is Obama's goal here? He's already tossed in something like $300 billion in tax cuts to curry Republican favor, and his spending plans amount to about $200 billion per year for two years. That's a big number, but it's also only about 1-2% of GDP. It's not that big a deal, and as a response to a massive recession it ought to be a no-brainer, even for Republicans.

But they're playing the game anyway. By pretending to be skeptical, they're hoping to wring yet more concessions out of Obama. Which is exactly what you'd expect them to do. It's politics.

But what does Obama get out of this? He's got the votes to pass his package already, and it's hard to see what a bigger vote total buys him. In fact, considering what a crowd pleaser this bill is likely to be (jobs + tax cuts + aid to states = wild popularity), it's not entirely clear why Obama is working so hard to get Republican votes. Wouldn't it be better if the public saw this bill as a Democratic victory enacted over the meanspirited, neo-Hooverite obstructionism of a dying and bitter Republican Party? Besides, when push comes to shove, my guess is that plenty of Republicans will be clamoring to vote for this bill no matter what Obama does. Who wants to be left off the gravy train with elections coming up in a mere 22 months?

(And if, against all odds, the bill ends up being unpopular, or viewed as ineffective? Or the economy continues to suck no matter what? Well, all the Republican votes in the world still won't help Obama. They'll attack him viciously whether they voted for the bill or not, and he'll own the economy, for good or ill, regardless.)

I guess this all comes down to whether you really believe Obama can change the tone in Washington. He seems to genuinely believe he can, and his actions on the stimulus bill make sense if you see them as the opening move in a long-term project to dial down the bitter partisanship of the past couple of decades. The press might eat this up (or might not, since they generally dismiss this kind of talk from Democrats), but I continue to wonder what makes Obama believe he can pull this off? There's just no evidence from history to suggest that this can work, and no evidence from the recent history of the conservative movement to suggest that they're planning to adopt a more conciliatory tone over the next few years.

So I continue to wonder: What does Obama see that I don't? What does he know that I don't? I'm flummoxed.

Political Persuasion

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| Tue Jan. 6, 2009 9:30 AM PST

POLITICAL PERSUASION....Matt Yglesias mocks RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's recent burbling about how Republicans need to start using Twitter and Facebook and "the different technology that young people are using today":

I love Twitter. I have two Twitter feeds. I manage one with Twitterific and another with Twitterfox. And of course there's my iPhone interfaces, too. Twitter's neat, it's fun, I enjoy it. But you can't do political persuasion on Twitter and anyone who's at all familiar with either Twitter or political persuasion could tell you that. It's important for political movements to embrace new technologies, but part of embracing new technologies is understanding them and actually respecting what they're for and Twitter is never going to be anything other than an incidental sideshow to political activism.

I'm not so sure about that. It sort of depends on what you mean by "political persuasion," I think. A steady stream of tweets containing ever more apocalyptic messages about (for example) the imminent demise of American civilization due to immigration legislation wending its way through Congress could be effective at helping to rouse the masses to protest. Couldn't it? Matt is probably right that Twitter by itself is something of a sideshow, but all of these technologies put together (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) could end up being as effective in mobilizing the 20something generation as talk radio was mobilizing the Newt generation. And mobilization is persuasion, no?

Actually, Duncan's real problem is probably not so much that he's wrong about Twitter, but that he doesn't have any real clue about what Twitter is. He seems to treat it more like a buzzword than a genuine concept. But at least it's a start.

Favorite Presidents

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 6:42 PM PST

FAVORITE PRESIDENTS....At a recent debate, all the candidates for RNC chairman named Reagan as their favorite Republican. Ezra Klein comments:

It's really weird that Republican candidates for high office almost never named Abraham Lincoln as their favorite Republican president. He was, after all, a Republican. And he was inarguably more consequential than Reagan, no matter how enamored you are of Reagan's tenure. Indeed, most historians consider him America's greatest president.

Ezra chalks this up to coded racism, and maybe that's right. I guess I'd guess be a little more generous, though, and attribute it instead to the different valences of favorite vs. greatest, figuring that Lincoln would be more likely to come up if these guys were asked who the greatest Republican was. Maybe.

But this is really just an excuse to observe the weird fact that for modern conservative Republicans, Reagan isn't merely their most frequently named favorite, he's pretty much their only possible answer to this question. Bush Jr. is obviously damaged goods. Bush Sr., Ford, and Eisenhower are more or less considered closet Democrats these days. Nixon was a crook. Hoover — 'nuff said. Coolidge and Harding were do-nothings. If you're restricting yourself to the past century, you're basically stuck with Reagan and no one else.

Democrats have it way better. Sure, most Dems of the past century produce mixed sentiments (especially Wilson and LBJ) but virtually every one of them is at least a plausible candidate for "favorite Democrat." Modern liberals haven't excommunicated any of them.

Why is this? Why is it that Republicans have produced only one president in the past century that they're still enthusiastic about?

Panetta to Head Up CIA

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 5:39 PM PST

PANETTA TO HEAD UP CIA....Apparently Barack Obama has chosen Leon Panetta to head the CIA. This is a pretty unconventional choice since Panetta has no intelligence experience, but David Corn is enthusiastic:

A CIA director who has denounced torture, advocated intelligence cuts, and backed greater congressional control of covert operations — that would be....different. This appointment certainly has the potential to spark opposition from inside and outside the agency. But if Panetta manages to make it to Langley without much fuss, that would indeed signal real change in Washington.

More about Panetta at the link. Panetta on torture here.

UPDATE: Feinstein and Rockefeller apparently aren't very enthusiastic about this choice.

Finally....Election Pool Winners!

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 1:38 PM PST

FINALLY....ELECTION POOL WINNERS!....Back in October I held a pool to guess the results of the November election. With Al Franken now the official winner of the Minnesota senate race (officially enough for me, anyway), I can finally declare a winner.

Two winners, actually. Here's how things broke down:

  • Obama won 365 electoral votes, but nobody got that exactly right. (Thanks, Nebraska!) So I rounded up all the people who predicted 364 electoral votes.

  • Democrats won 257 House seats and 59 Senate seats (counting the two independents). However, none of the folks in the 364 pool got that exactly right.

  • But two people came close. Professional prognosticator Sam Wang (founder of the Princeton Election Consortium) guessed 257 House seats and 58 Senate seats, while James Shearer predicted 260 House seats and 59 Senate seats.

Congratulations, James and Sam! A free subscription to Mother Jones is yours for the asking. Just email me your address and I'll get you signed up.

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The N-Effect

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 12:20 PM PST

THE N-EFFECT....Via Tyler Cowen, a couple of researchers have uncovered what they call the N-Effect: it turns out, they say, that people do better when competing against a small number of people than when competing against a large number.

At first, this seems unsurprising: you have a better chance of winning against a small group than a large group, a small group is less distracting than a large group, etc. There are also lots of confounding factors when you try to measure this, which makes me take their conclusions about SAT scores (they're supposedly higher in small groups) with a grain of salt. But what if you just tell people they're competing against a small group?

Experimenters asked potential participants if they would be willing to take part in a short experiment. One experimenter then handed participants a two-page packet (a cover page followed by a short quiz page) and explained they would be taking a timed quiz and their goal was to finish the quiz as fast as possible without compromising accuracy. Participants were told they were competing against either 10 or 100 other participants and that those scoring in the top 20 percent in completion time would receive $5. The short quiz contained four general knowledge multiple-choice questions (e.g. "Who is the Secretary General of the UN?") and four true-false statements (e.g., "Michigan is shaped like a shoe").

Once the first experimenter gave participants the packets and instructions, the second experimenter, blind to the experimental condition, informed participants he would begin timing them with a stopwatch. Afterwards, each participant wrote their e-mail address, in case they scored in the top 20th percentile. Participants in the top 20 percent were later paid $5.

There were no actual group dynamics at work here since the quiz was administered one-on-one. And both groups had a 20% chance of winning five bucks. But the first group finished the quiz in an average of 29 seconds, while the second took 33 seconds.

The authors do some further tests to demonstrate that this effect isn't due to mistaken ideas about odds being better in small groups, or to a decrease in motivation due to perceived task difficulty. Basically, it seems that people just feel more motivated to compete if they think they're competing against an indentifiable group rather than a large mob. The application of this conclusion to the blogosphere is left as an exercise for the reader.

DOMA

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 11:28 AM PST

DOMA....Bob Barr, the Georgia congressman who authored the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, writes in the LA Times today that it's time to get rid of it:

The first part of DOMA [] is a partial bow to principles of federalism, protecting the power of each state to determine its definition of marriage. The second part sets a legal definition of marriage only for purposes of federal law, but not for the states. That was the theory.

I've wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned....In effect, DOMA's language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don't want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran's benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Hopefully DOMA will end up on the ash heap of history, where it so richly deserves to be, before the year is out.

World Government Watch

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 10:57 AM PST

WORLD GOVERNMENT WATCH....John Bolton and John Yoo complain today in the New York Times that Barack Obama might be tempted to overstep his constitutional bounds by sidestepping the requirement that all treaties be approved by two-thirds of the Senate:

On a broad variety of issues — many of which sound more like domestic rather than foreign policy — the re-emergence of the benignly labeled "global governance" movement is well under way in the Obama transition.

Candidate Obama promised to "re-engage" and "work constructively within" the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate?

Steve Benen notes the irony of hearing this argument from John Yoo, who, back when he worked in the Bush administration, was probably the biggest booster of unfettered executive power this side of Dick Cheney. Beyond that, though, I'm a little puzzled about what he and Bolton are even talking about here. Will Obama try to approve the Kyoto Treaty with only a majority vote of Congress? That's easy: no he won't. How about a followup treaty? Not likely. On the other hand, might Obama introduce climate legislation that binds the United States to goals that are similar to Kyoto? Sure, he might. But that's not a treaty, it's just domestic legislation.

Very odd. But toward the end of the piece Bolton and Yoo make it pretty clear that they aren't especially concerned with constitutional delicacies anyway. They just don't like treaties, full stop. But then, conservatives never have, have they?

FoPo Blogging

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| Mon Jan. 5, 2009 10:22 AM PST

FoPo BLOGGING....Lots of new foreign policy blogging over at Foreign Policy magazine today. They've rolled out a whole series of new blogs from Dan Drezner, Steven Walt, Tom Ricks, David Rothkopf, Marc Lynch, and Laura Rozen ("The Cable"). There's also — and no, I'm not making this up — Madam Secretary, "an obsessive blog about all things Hillary Clinton." There are also a few new group blogs, and of course, their current blog, Passport, continues as usual.

Dan, Marc, and Laura are old friends around here, and I wish them luck in their new home. The others, especially Ricks and Walt, will be worth keeping an eye on too. The official intro is here.

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