Beyond Red & Blue

Even LBJ wasn't as powerful as "LBJ"

Ed Kilgore has a timely reminder that no president has been able to get major legislation passed without being a "sellout" to his base. Not even the famously bossy Lyndon Johnson:

...the myth of LBJ as the driven president demanding and securing progressive legislation against the grain of party, congressional prerogatives, and even public opinion, is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. LBJ showed great courage and resolution on civil rights, but he was riding almost a century of momentum, and he certainly didn't reject bipartisanship in his effort to get the job done. The landmark health care initiatives of Medicare and Medicaid were "betrayals" of the long-established progressive goal of national health insurance--certainly far more so than, say, the substitution of a health care cooperatives for a "public option" in a system of universal health coverage.

Isn't "power politics" a redundant term?

Joan Vennochi has a typically well-written but surprisingly angry column in today's Boston Globe on Sen. Ted Kennedy's plea for a law allowing Democratic Gov. Patrick to appoint a replacement if (well, when) Kennedy dies in office. The replacement would serve for a few months, until a special election could be held. This law would partially reverse a 2004 law that was clearly designed to prevent Republican Gov. Mitt Romney from appointing a senator to serve for almost two years in the event that John Kerry was elected president.

She begins:

Let's be honest. Ted Kennedy’s last wish is not about principle. It’s about politics.

He said it’s about giving Massachusetts voters a voice in Washington. But it’s really about giving Senate President Harry Reid 60 votes on health care reform.

And from there Vennochi only gets harsher:

From a political perspective, it shows how much President Obama and the Democrats have lost their way. They are so desperate, they must squeeze the last drop of power out of a dying man.

Kennedy is flexing his political muscle, to be sure, but this seems like a pretty mild use of force in the service of one of the most important legislative battles of the past 50 years. Venocchi calls it "desperate," but I'm pretty sure that every one of my political science professors from Boston University would prefer a term like "resourceful."

In fact, I'll wager that if the state Legislature refuses to pass a bill allowing for Kennedy's quick replacement and health care reform then fails in the US Senate by one vote, no reputable historian or political scientist will ever credit Beacon Hill leaders with standing on principle. Rather, they will examine three possible motives for the refusal:

• They wanted to kill federal health care reform.
• They wanted to embarrass Ted Kennedy.
• They wanted to embarrass Barack Obama.

It's also odd that Venocchi's column on "power politics" fails to mention that state Senate President Therese Murray, reportedly "cool" toward Kennedy's proposal, was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in last year's presidential primary and was miffed by Kennedy's endorsement of Obama.

UPDATE: I forgot the fourth possible motive, which may actually be the most probable: Democratic legislative leaders, who have been feuding with Gov. Patrick for years, are loath to give him any new power; and Patrick, with approval ratings in the cellar, is afraid to ask for it.

Obama's predictable victory and his squishy mandate

Election 2008 was not as dramatic, and did not have as many plot twists, as political commentators suggested at the time. So say Andrew Gelman and John Sides in the September edition of the Boston Review. Their rundown of voting returns, poll results, and journalistic memes is a good antidote to romanticized reporting: 

The Obama victory was historic, but it was not surprising; Obama shifted, but did not redraw, the electoral map; race and class mattered, but not in the way people assumed they would matter; and partisan loyalty was powerful even as partisan defections like Colin Powell’s garnered headlines. Furthermore, it is simply too soon to tell how and how much campaign tactics mattered, whether this election’s outcome constitutes a realignment in voting behavior, and whether Obama has emerged with a mandate.

A couple of quibbles, though. First, I agree that the obsession over Electoral College strategy threatens to overshadow the fact that elections are still about national trends. As Gelman and Sides write, "the economy shifted the whole terrain in the Democrats' favor and Obama took advantage of this." (You really have to go back to 1948 for an election in which both the Democratic and Republican nominees scooped up several states that had gone to the other party four years before.)

That said, every election has its quirky geographic outcomes that may or may not prove long-lasting. The prime example of 2008 was Indiana, where the Democratic percentage jumped 11 points from the last election (versus an increase of 5 points in the US as a whole). Gelman and Sides note that Obama's field operations probably pushed up his vote totals in states like Indiana and North Carolina, but it's going take another election before it's safe to dismiss the idea that that the two parties' geographic bases did, in fact, shift somewhat in 2008.

Second, Gelman and Sides's skepticism toward the idea that a presidential election results in a "mandate" should be disheartening to anyone who's not a fan of congressional gridlock. It may indeed be true that presidential election results don't necessarily carry much weight in Congress, but I don't agree with what seems to be the authors' excusal for that outcome:

We cannot assume that people voted for Obama based on detailed knowledge of his policy positions.... Instead people often choose a preferred candidate and then rationalize issue positions to fit this preference. So we cannot interpret an election outcome as a wholesale endorsement of the winner’s policy proposals (or as a wholesale rejection of the loser’s).

But even with an informed electorate, there can't be a "wholesale" (or "blanket") endorsement of all of the winning candidate's proposals. That doesn't mean that there can never be a mandate for broad proposals (like health care reform) or ideological approaches.

And there is a possible contradiction in the Boston Review piece in that Gelman and Sides also note that "Approximately 90 percent of the public identifies with or leans toward one of the two major parties, and the vast majority of partisans supports their party's presidential candidate." To me, that seems very different than the notion that more than a small number of voters "chose a preferred candidate and then rationalize issue positions to fit this preference." If a voter actually chooses a candidate on the basis of party affiliation, I don't see how rationalization (or ignorance) of that candidate's issue positions can be inferred.

I think it's premature to dismiss the idea of a mandate from 2008. Of course, if a large number of people who voted for Obama start protesting the very idea of health care reform, something I haven't yet seen documented, then I'll concede that there was no policy mandate in last year's election outcome.

Florida hits a population wall

The St. Petersburg Times's James Thorner reports an estimate that Florida has lost population for the first time since 1946:

Most economic forecasters expect Florida's population dip to be short-lived. Scott Brown, chief economist for Raymond James Financial in St. Petersburg, sees it as a one-year anomaly. But it's a stunning one in a state that has been so reliant on surging population.

"We used to say the growth industry in Florida has been growth, kind of as a joke," he said.

In a state with no income tax, state and local governments count heavily on migrating retirees to boost revenue and create jobs. In fact, the lack of an income tax is part of the allure.

The recession-fueled collapse of stock prices last year stopped some of that. Retirees wanting to move to Florida either couldn't sell their homes up north or lacked a mortgage down payment after investment accounts took a pounding.

"That engine shuts off and you wonder where you're going to raise funds. There's no state income tax you can tweak. You can cut, cut and cut till people get fed up," Brown said.

The estimate of a 50,000 drop in population from April 2008 to April 2009 comes from the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, which tracks building permits and the opening/closing of electric company accounts.

A bad-climate discount on housing in Massachusetts?

Matthew Yglesias points us to an interesting map at Gene Expression that shows housing values in relation to median income (though the data is a couple of years old). For creative class aficionados who won't consider living in flyover country, the most striking thing about the map is how expensive the entire West Coast is. Yglesias speculates:

There’s a fascinating difference here between the west coast and the northeast. The areas right around New York and Boston got very pricey, but pretty quickly the counties turn red [i.e., relatively affordable] again. On the west coast, by contrast, the blue extends quite far into the hinterlands.

That said, the weather is clearly much better on the west coast than on the east coast, so arguably it makes sense that west coast housing should be more expensive relative to economic opportunities.

For quite a long time, one of the most frustrating things about Massachusetts is how expensive it is to live here despite a climate that makes backyards and decks unusable for much of the year. Maybe we've reached a tipping point, and our friends on the West Coast will have to pay a penalty for their damned beautiful days.

NPR maps economic data

National Public Radio's recently improved website includes three handy maps with county-by-county data on foreclosure rates, unemployment rates, and median household income. (One complaint: Even when you zoom in on Massachusetts, it's tricky to get your cursor to recognize, and provide data for, the Cape and Islands.)

The most recent data show a few foreclosure hot spots in Massachusetts -- highest in Plymouth County, where one in every 541 homes is involved in foreclosure proceedings, a figure almost exactly the same as in Ann Arbor's Washtenaw County, Michigan. That's nowhere as bad as the major counties of Arizona, California, Florida, northwest Georgia, and Nevada. (One in every 50 homes in Las Vegas's Clark County is in foreclosure!) But it's a lot higher than you'll find in Appalachia or in the Farm Belt.

The Bay State looks better on the unemployment map, with only Bristol County in double digits, at 10.9 percent. (Again, our worst county is almost exactly the same as Ann Arbor, which has 10.6 percent unemployment.) We seem to have been spared from the massive storm front of joblessness that extends from Michigan to Florida -- for now, anyway.

State governments as anachronisms

This isn't a post on how undemocratic the American federalist system is. (Thanks to the constitutional two-senators-per-state rule and the non-constitutional "rule" that it takes 60 of 100 senators to pass legislation, 41 senators representing 13 percent of the US population can kill legislation.) Instead, here is a link to James Surowiecki's New Yorker essay on the economic pitfalls of our 50-state model, and specifically the way it's an obstacle to getting out of the current recession.

Surowieki makes two major points. The first is that, because almost every state (including Massachusetts) has laws requiring a balanced budget, state governments are forced to cut services and raise taxes, which is precisely the opposite of what the federal government is trying to accomplish through stimulus spending:

The states’ fiscal policy, then, is procyclical: it’s amplifying the effects of the downturn, instead of mitigating them. Even as the federal government is pouring money into the economy, state governments are effectively taking it out. It’s a push-me, pull-you approach to fighting the recession.

Second, and this does bring the topic back to the Senate in a way, is that federal spending is pretty much always inefficient because it's distributed on a state-by-state basis:

Much of the tens of billions of dollars that will be spent on roads, for instance, will be funnelled through the states. As a result, a disproportionate amount of the money will be spent in rural areas (which exert disproportionate influence on state governments), leaving cities—which happen to have most of the people and most of the traffic—shortchanged. The top eighty-five metropolitan areas in the country are responsible for about three-quarters of the country’s G.D.P.

But I don't expect that any of this will change in the near future. Local governments find Washington too handy a political foil to give the federal government any more power.

Obama vs. congressional Republicans: no comparison

I think that Matthew Ygelsias may be overstating President Obama's political strength vs. Congress, as supposedly evidenced by this chart:

Ygelsias suggests:

If I’m in White House Legislative Affairs and I’m talking to a nervous member of congress, I’m showing them that chart and arguing that the progressive president is more popular than the somewhat dawdling congressional Democrats and way more popular than the obstructionist Republicans.

The problem for Obama is that people don't vote for "congressional Democrats" or "congressional Republicans," they vote for individual candidates, usually incumbents. I'm sure that every member of Congress would claim to be more popular back home than his or her own party, and there are plenty of polls to support this. (This 2005 ABC News poll showed that 43 percent of Americans approved of Congress but 65 percent approved of their own congressman.) 

Further, a surefire way to build support at home is to loudly and repeatedly proclaim your independence from, well, everybody and everything -- including your own party, the president, the media, special interest groups, ideological groups, and whichever mentors have helped your political career. (If you're a married man, however, it's mandatory for you to joke that your wife makes all the important decisions.)

I just don't see how waving around charts about the generic approval ratings for Congress will help Obama win votes for legislation. It's a different story with congressmen and senators who face serious primary or general election opponents next year -- when Obama can promise to campaign for an incumbent or stay out of the race, depending on the district -- but there aren't likely to be more than a handful of such cases.

Palin's bad timing: The world is "too dangerous" for her right now

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has been getting a lot of attention for her post-election takedown of Sarah Palin as an intellectual lightweight. But Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, is careful to avoid the implication that it's always been a bad idea to send ill-informed people to the White House. Here's her rationale for turning against Republican VP nominee Palin:

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

The world has never been more dangerous? Not even during the Great Depression or Cold War? Or the Black Plague? I'm open to the argument that human existence is at its most precarious because of climate change, but Noonan doesn't include that in her list:

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

I don't see how Noonan's reasoning is any different than the cliche that each presidential election is "the most important ever."

I also wonder whether Noonan is giving herself room to back a Palin-caliber candidate in the future. The "prolonged American crash" probably won't last forever, and recovery is bound to bring another George W. Bush ready to run for president on the promise of tax cuts and more tax cuts. Noonan notes of Palin's national candidacy that "in another age it might not have been terrible." Will that "other age" be back in 2012 or 2016?

"Eds and meds" buck national job loss trend

New state-level employment data for June 2009 are out today. Compared with June 2008, total jobs are down in 49 states -- all except North Dakota.

But jobs in "eds and meds" (education and health services) are up in 49 states -- all except Arizona. (See Page 16 of PDF.)