Kevin Drum

PARKING....Matt Yglesias suggests that conservatives ought to apply free market thinking to issues of urban development:

To my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access?

Well, sure. Actually, though, I think conservatives are generally fairly open to the idea of letting developers do whatever they want just on general pandering-to-business-interests grounds. The problem is that the public tends to be rabidly opposed to this kind of thing, and nobody who proposes it has a chance of getting elected (or reelected). So discretion ends up becoming the better part of valor.

Of course, there's also a chicken and egg problem here. You really can't build enormous apartment complexes with little or no parking if everyone who lives in the area owns a car. Nobody will rent your apartments if they can't park their cars, after all. Mass transit is the obvious answer to this, but it's still the case that no one will rent your apartment unless transit is so good that they can ditch their car entirely and therefore don't need a parking place. But in most places mass transit is nowhere near that good, so parking spaces continue to be needed. But as long parking spaces are freely available, the pressure to improve mass transit remains minimal.

What to do? Cities have some pretty good options for improving transit, along with a populace that's less car crazy than the rest of the country, but they usually have huge budgetary constraints. Suburbs and rural areas, conversely, sometimes have the money but seem hopelessly distant from any kind of reasonable solution in anything but the longest term. Here in Orange County, for example, you'd almost literally have to bulldoze the entire place and build anew to get even close to the density you'd need for a decent mass transit system to work.

Maybe motor scooters are the answer. If we all owned one car and one little Vespa out here in suburbia, instead of two cars, we could start cutting back on parking spaces gradually and save gasoline in the process. An electric Vespa with 30 or 40 miles of range on a charge would be even better. Maybe development of a Volt-based scooter ought to be a condition for a GM bailout.

Might not be very popular outside the warm weather south, though. Any other ideas?

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GUTTING THE TROUT....Ezra informs us today that the healthcare insurance industry has blinked. But it's sort of a Sarah Palin blink:

The big news of the day is that the insurance industry has offered a deal: In return for a mandate in which every American must purchase health care coverage, they will stop refusing to sell insurance to those with preexisting conditions. Some deal. They're basically saying that if we legislate that every American must purchase insurance coverage, they will sell insurance coverage, at some price, to every American.

Needless to say, this is a deal that every industry in America would love. Take GM, for example. Why bother bailing them out with taxpayer cash? Just pass a law instead mandating that every American has to buy a Chevy, let GM set the price, and they'd be back in business!

Of course, it's actually worse than that. At least if you mandated car purchases, the car companies would still compete for business by lowering prices. Healthcare companies, conversely, don't want your business if you have a preexisting condition. Why would they? So they'd actually do just the opposite, jacking up prices steadily to ensure that someone else will end up getting your business if you happen to be a diabetic or have a family history of coronary trouble.

Ezra explains all this in more detail, but for now I'll just observe that a blink is a blink, even if the deal on the table is patently ridiculous. It means the health insurance industry is scared that we might actually do something in 2009 and they want to be seen as something other than completely obstructionist. That means only one thing: they've shown fear, and now it's time to bore in for the kill and gut them like trouts. Let's get to it.

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OOGEDY-BOOGEDY....Kathleen Parker blames the demise of the Republican Party on its "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch," and Jonah Goldberg is annoyed:

What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I'm at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

OK, maybe "oogedy-boogedy" wasn't the most felicitous phrase to use. Sway to the music all you want and no one will mind. But I think conservatives do themselves a disservice if they pretend not to know what Parker is talking about.

There will always be plenty of votes for a culturally conservative party. That's not the problem. The problem is the venomous, spittle-flecked, hardcore cultural conservatism that's become the public face of the evangelical wing of the GOP. It's the wing that doesn't just support more stringent immigration laws, but that turns the issue into a hate fest against La Raza, losing 3 million Latino votes in the process. It's the wing that isn't just a little skittish about gay marriage, but that turns homophobia into a virtual litmus test, losing 6 million young voters in the process. It's the wing that isn't just religious, but that treats belief as a precondition to righteousness, losing 2 million secular voters in the process. It's the wing that isn't just nostalgic for old traditions, but that fetishizes the heartland as the only real America, losing 7 million urban voters in the process. It's the wing that goes into a legislative frenzy over Terri Schiavo but six months later can barely rouse itself into more than a yawn over the destruction of New Orleans.

Now, the GOP didn't lose all those votes solely because of their embrace of cultural victimhood. It was a Democratic year, after all, and the economy worked against them too. Still, exit polls suggest they had already lost most of this ground by 2006, and the economy had nothing to do with it back then. Conservative gains after 9/11 may have masked the problem for a while, but fundamentally these are voters who saw the Republican Party turn into a party of rabid identity politics and turned away in disgust. It's probably cost them (so far) about 10 million votes, and in an era where 53-47 is considered a big victory, that's a helluva deficit to make up elsewhere.

A party that merely wants to move more slowly and more deliberately than liberals in the cultural sphere wouldn't have lost all those votes. But the real-life GOP, a party whose primary association in much of the public mind is with revulsion toward gays, immigrants, urban elites, and the non-churchgoing, did. That's oogedy-boogedy.

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TEAM OF RIVALS?....Is Barack Obama really assembling a "team of rivals," as Abraham Lincoln did in Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Lincoln's presidency? Goodwin's book was a little too hagiographic for my taste (even Lincoln's obvious mistakes routinely get spun into accidental acts of genius), but there's no question that Lincoln really did surround himself with a contentious bunch of personalities. Obama, conversely, doesn't really seem to be doing that. Hillary Clinton and the other SecState candidates are the only real "rivals" he's considering for his cabinet, and one cabinet spot hardly counts as a team, does it?

Still, Dan Drezner thinks the Goodwin analogy is serving Obama well:

That said, it's pretty smart for Obama and his staff to spread this meme around. First, it flatters all of his cabinet officers to think that they're like Seward, Salmon Chase et al. Second, by invoking the metaphor, Obama gets to frame his administration as evoking both the great challenges of the Civil War period and the greatness of Lincoln.

So maybe Obama isn't assembling a team of rivals after all, but he's still a pretty smart cookie for faking us into thinking he is. Nice move from the former gym rat.

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