Economic Policy Conservatives

In yesterday's Dallas Morning News, my former DC colleague Charles Blahous concludes his thoughtful op-ed on, Who will stop America's plunge into debt?, with the following:

One thing is for certain: Unless and until economic policy conservatives finally put the Trump years behind them, there will be no serious challenge to the left’s economic agenda, and the only debate will be over how rapidly to expand government. The contest over America’s economic future can only truly be joined if moderates and conservatives reunite to advocate for fiscal prudence and free economic activity, wielding the same energy and commitment that the left uses to pursue government’s expansion.

The first statement is true but it does not go far enough. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Economic policy conservatives were on this road to ruin when Chuck and I both served on the Bush economic policy team. Not at our suggestion, the Bush administration passed a new Medicare Part D benefit that, at the time of its passing, had a larger projected unfunded liability than Social Security's projected unfunded liability, which was the fiscal threat that I went to Washington to help solve. My very first week on the job, I wrote a memo to try to get more means-testing onto that new entitlement. (Some of those ideas were later published here, alongside a similar analysis of the marketplace subsidies in Obamacare.) Prior to my arrival in DC, the Bush administration passed a series of so-called temporary tax cuts, almost all of which were eventually made permanent by the Bush and Obama administrations. When the latter did so in the face of the so-called "fiscal cliff" in early 2013, I referred to it as creating a fiscal grand canyon.

All of this happened before the Trump administration.What economic policy conservatives need to do to challenge the left's economic agenda is to acknowledge that:

1. Republicans have expanded our fiscal imbalances through entitlement spending when it suited their political interests.
   
2. Republicans have squandered resources in ill-conceived military operations in Iraq during the early part of this century.
3. Republicans have ignored fiscal balance over the last 20 years when passing tax cuts for the sake of passing tax cuts.
4. There are some valid reasons for the federal government to engage in deficit spending if needed, primarily when it benefits children who are born into challenging social and economic circumstances. (See this paper for an introduction.)
   

Economic policy conservatives, when they can acknowledge these things that implicate much more of the Republican Party's recent history than the Trump administration, might then be able to play a constructive role in countering the left's economic agenda. They are not credible elements of the economic policy process if they don't.

 

Looking Ahead to 2024

David Brooks pins our current social and political problems on Collapsing Levels of Trust in his recent column in The Atlantic. I think he gets most of his arguments right. Without evidence that people are in general trustworthy, individuals will tend to congregate with others in their tribes. The way this is playing out today is polarization toward the far left and the far right.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it in his recent book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times:

The far right dreams of a Golden Age that never was, and the far left dreams of a utopia that will never be.

It is not an unreasonable reading of 20th century history to say that when the extremes are emboldened in pursuit of these dreams, the result is violent and horrific. What are reasonable people supposed to do?

In brief, form a new tribe in the center. I am politically to the right of the center, but probably no more so than most of the people whom I call friends are to the left of center. If we chose to, we could waste a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, or other anti-social media arguing about whether the lunatics well to their left are worse than the lunatics well to my right. We would be making the problem worse, by acting like partisans and letting the extremists set the agenda for public discussion and civic life. And yet this is the pattern into which we have fallen. Instead, we could disavow them both. 

 

I would wager that a coalition that included them on its left flank and me on the right flank would constitute a majority and would enact sensible policies. Centrist parties are thought not to be possible in our Presidential system in part because the parties that start on the far left or far right will find it easy to encroach on the center without losing the support of their flanks. I understand this as an equilibrium result. Are we in or moving toward such an equilibrium? I see no evidence that the two major political parties are courting the political center by moving toward the center. So perhaps there is a window of opportunity during which this coalition could govern. In other countries, they would call this a unity government, and such governments typically get formed when the alternatives are pretty awful. I am surprised that 2019 was not awful enough to spark such an insurgency of the rational. I suspect 2020 is that awful but the timing relative the Presidential election is unfavorable.

 

The last link and the phrase it highlights are to a TEDx talk by my colleague Charlie Wheelan, who put forth a sensible platform in the Centrist Manifesto in 2013 and founded Unite America to try to get a pivotal centrist bloc in the Senate. The Achilles heel in that strategy turned out to be that it presumes a Congress that seeks to perform even its most basic Constitutional responsibilities. So, looking ahead to 2024, we should be thinking about a centrist ticket for the Presidency, composed initially of a bipartisan duo with a prudent and responsible platform that begins to address the many crises we have built for ourselves. If the ticket wins, then the party can immediately recruit Senators and Representatives from the political center for a majority in each House, leaving the two existing parties in the extremes. Addressing those crises, even if incrementally, is what will help rebuild trust in our public life.

DC Statehood

Last week, the House passed a bill to allow for statehood for Washington, DC. I am in favor of representation in national legislature for the residents of the District, but I am not in favor of statehood. The Founders intended for the District to not be a part of any state. Here is a proposal formed from ideas I've picked up over the years from various sources, so I don't claim originality here.

We could think of the District as part of Maryland, which gave the land for it. Allow the District to be its own Congressional district. This is only fair, as the House allocates representation based on population. The District gets a minimum of 1 Representative (and is protected from gerrymandering that might occur if it were formally part of Maryland). For the Senate, allow residents of the District to vote for the Senators that represent Maryland. Then its residents have two Senators to represent them. 

This solves the problem that there are no voting members of the national legislature who are responsive to the residents of the District. It does so with minimal disruption. I acknowledge that Maryland has to take one for the team and needs to consent. But this is where I would start the conversation.

Ratf**ked, Now From the Left

About a year ago, I read the book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, by David Daley. It is an eye-opening account of how some Republican strategists figured out that by flipping a few state legislatures from blue to red, the Republicans would get to control the redistricting process after the 2010 Census and draw the maps for those states to favor their party. The book has chapters on Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Arizona -- the states where we have seen increased attention since. The strategy was quite successful. The books is worth your time, as a means of better understanding what happened in 2010 and sorting through the challenging issues associated with the Constitutionality of gerrymandering.

In today's Washington Post, James Hohmann describes (without reference to Daley's book, strangely) what some left-leaning groups are doing between now and the midterm elections to try to run that strategy on behalf of Democratic candidates. Midterm elections tend to favor the party that does not hold the Presidency, and the Tea Party was ascendant while the Democrats were snoozing in 2010. But in 2018, the midterm effect favors the Democrats, and in 2020, they will be driving high turnout due to their dissatisfaction with President Trump. So they are poised to make gains. What they won't have is an opposing party that is not paying attention. There is nothing magical in the way Democrats would figure out which races to target, so I expect the Republicans to contest them vigorously. If you are in one of those districts, I don't envy the political ads and robocalls you will be experiencing over the next two months.

Charlottesville: The Criminal, the Moral, and the Constitutional

A lot of ink has been spilled over the tragic events in Charlottesville last weekend. I spent the early part of the week trying to find good summaries and timelines of the events. I found two that were particularly helpful. The first was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, from University of Virginia President Terry Sullivan's perspective. She continues to be on the front lines of many challenges confronting higher education, and I think she's holding up pretty well. The second was in Buzzfeed, in which reporter Blake Montgomery gave his first-person account.

I spent the last few days thinking about my own response and the various responses of others to the events. I think that one problem in the way the nation is articulating its response is that there are (at least) three elements of the events in Charlottesville that need to be distinguished.

The easiest element to identify is the Criminal. The horrific incident, in which a car being driven by James Alex Fields Jr. plowed through a crowd and crashed into other cars, left 1 person dead and 19 others wounded. This incident happened after the rally was declared an unlawful assembly. Fields will be prosecuted as a criminal, for offenses including second-degree murder.

The Moral element is also pretty easy to identify. Many, probably almost all, of the participants in the "Unite the Right" rally draped themselves in the imagery of the Confederacy or the Nazis. I can only imagine how pathetic life would have to be to hide behind symbols of genocide and the regimes that inflicted them. (Kevin Williamson has some ideas at NRO.) To do so in proximity to those who have suffered or lost loved ones to those regimes is a heinous act, for which there is no moral justification.

But here the Constitutional element is relevant. That heinous act of spewing white nationalism, whether through conventional media for speech or in an otherwise peaceful assembly, is protected by the First Amendment. Those who organized the "Unite the Right" rally had the right to do so, and they should not be threatened with or subjected to violence for doing so. This is true despite the fact that their ideology, if they could implement it, would impose violence on others. And those on the Left who seek to deny that right to speak and assemble -- an extreme form of the heckler's veto that is so evident on college campuses today -- should be criticized severely. The same is true of those who, during last year's Presidential campaign, are reported to have perpetrated violence against people attending a political event for the then-candidate Trump. The ACLU was right to file the lawsuit on behalf of the "Unite the Right" organizers who wanted the event at the site of the Robert E. Lee statue. They are also on solid ground to, going forward, refuse to represent such groups if they insist on carrying firearms to such events.

Prosecute the Criminal, Condemn the (IM)Moral, and Uphold the Constitutional.

How Successful Was the Tea Party Movement?

Over Dartmouth's recent spring break, I made some lunchtime remarks at a meeting of the Dartmouth Club of Dallas. The theme of my remarks was that we have recently seen, or will soon see, the poor outcomes of trends that have been a long time in the making. I used some examples that have been the subject of blog posts -- the depopulation of urban areas in the Midwest that put Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even Ohio in play for the Republicans in 2016; the chronic underfunding of state and local pension plans; and the impending financial consequences of the Baby Boom generation shifting from being a large, productive cohort of contributors to old-age entitlement programs to being a large cohort of program beneficiaries.

On this occasion, I added a new outcome that we should have expected based on recent events. The election of Donald Trump represents the culmination of the Tea Party movement. Here's what I said:

As much as the media fomented stories about discord between the Trump campaign and the Republican establishment, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus – reflecting the insurgent and the traditional elements of the Republican Party – were working together on Trump’s campaign since at least August 15^th.

In light of this, I think we have to acknowledge that the Tea Party is one of the most electorally successful political movements in our lifetimes. I say electoral success – this does not necessarily imply ideological or policy success. And it has achieved its success without much formal, top-down mobilization. Recall that this movement began in February 2009 in opposition to Obama’s early policies, particularly his announced plans to give financial aid to bankrupt homeowners but also including the stimulus bill and eventually Obamacare. Some elements appear to be for a smaller public sector and lowering the public debt, but others have shown up to town hall meetings with, shall we say puzzling, slogans like, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” (In fairness, though, we do refer to Medicare as an “entitlement program,” so eventually people might start believing that.)

As an aside, lest you think it matters as much to Trump supporters as it does to his critics, you may have been reading in newspapers this week articles with sensational headlines that contend that Trumpcare or Trump’s budget will disadvantage areas that voted for him. This is more misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Recall the origin of the movement – in opposition to a government handout that would have sent money to some of these same areas. I would argue that “nothing is the matter with Kansas” – it just doesn’t always vote its pocketbook. (We might even note that there are some positive social aspects of that approach.)

The Tea Party’s first victory was to strongly influence the outcomes in the 2010 midterm elections, flipping the House back to Republicans, which the Republicans have held since. The House turns over every two years, the Senate every six. In the first three Senate elections following the Tea Party’s formation, the Republicans picked up 13 seats: +6 in 2010, -2 in 2012, and +9 in 2014 to regain control before giving 2 back while retaining the Senate in 2016.  Given how many seats the Democrats will have to defend in 2018, the Democrats are unlikely to retake the Senate, despite what we are observing in Washington these days. 

And in 2016, the Tea Party elected a president. Much of what Trump considers to be his agenda – national security and sovereignty, economic nationalism, and (using Steve Bannon’s language) the deconstruction of the administrative state – appeals to the Tea Party movement. I don’t see how the other elements of the Reagan coalition – pro-business, libertarian, evangelical – can find their way back to power until, first, the Trump coalition organized around these nationalist themes surrenders its narrow Electoral College majority to a Democratic administration and, second, the population is ready to move on from that administration.

I made these remarks on March 17, before the debacle of the failure to move the AHCA the following week. What I take from that episode is that 2016 is this culmination of the Tea Party movement is also the peak of its electoral success. The rhetoric of criticism of the Obama administration was ill preparation for the realities of governing. Conor Friedersdorf describes the unraveling in riveting detail in the Atlantic yesterday. Save for appointments to the Supreme Court, President Trump is unlikely to accomplish anything fundamental that requires the Congress to participate. That includes the budget, walls on the border, and many other planks in his campaign platform. And the reason isn't that the Democrats refuse to cooperate -- it is that the Republicans will be unwilling or unable to move these initiatives along.

 

What Makes a Swing State Swing?

An article by my friend and former Bush Administration colleague Chuck Blahous provides a defense of the electoral college based on the claim that it focuses the presidential candidates on swing states. Here's the essence of the argument:

In an electoral college system, however, the campaigns are induced to focus less on the sheer size of a state and more on its political moderation.  The so-called swing or battleground states are those states with roughly equal numbers of voters potentially willing to back different candidates, such that an extra successful effort by one candidate could tip the balance.  This is not a theoretical concept, but rather an observable phenomenon. For example, this year the candidates repeatedly visited swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire.  Tiny New Hampshire, with its mere four electoral votes, received more candidate attention than California with its 55.  Why?  It is because New Hampshire was open to being persuaded by either candidate, whereas California was not.

As I noted to Chuck in some Facebook comments, I don't think this is true.  A state can be a "swing state" because it contains a lot of voters who are political moderates and thus swing voters. But a state can also be a "swing state" because it contains a roughly equal number of Democratic voters and Republican voters, who are no more persuadable than their counterparts in other states that have less equal numbers. In the latter case, the "political moderation" benefits of the electoral college don't materialize. From my experience, the Democrats in New Hampshire (where I work) are just as partisan and no more open to persuasion to vote for a Republican than the Democrats in Vermont (where I live). Chuck is correct that candidates respond to incentives and deluge the New Hampshire media market with advertising, but these advertisements may simply be efforts to turn out their base of partisans in larger numbers than their opponent's base of partisans.

To add some further support to my hypothesis, I would note that the political advertising done in New Hampshire during the general election was not particularly targeted to swing voters. All the negativity seemed like an effort to drive turnout by the candidate's base or to depress turnout by the opponent's base. I cannot recall an advertisement that tried to appeal to moderates who might be undecided (e.g. here's a problem we need to solve in a way that respects the valid points on both sides of the political spectrum.)

Much of Chuck's article is about what would happen in the counterfactual case where the national popular vote determined the winner. He is right that candidates would likely gravitate to their strongholds to try to drive turnout by their base. (President Bush remarked, when queried about his failure to capture the popular vote majority in 2000, that if that was the objective, he would have campaigned in Texas and "run up the score.") My simple model of what candidates are doing, now and in the counterfactual, is to devote their resources where the "price per vote" is the lowest. The price they pay is with their own time and with advertising. Population density matters for economizing on their time, but I presume that media buys are more expensive when they reach more people, so that it is not clear that media dollars would flow to the largest markets. Further, the media buys presumably depend on total population, not "total population likely to be sympathetic to your message." In this case, more politically diverse areas -- swing states -- would be further disadvantaged.

Addendum: How sad, I have finally repeated a post title without realizing it. Fortunately, the message is consistent.

Five Suggestions for the President-Elect

By now, if you are reading this blog, you know that Donald Trump is the President-Elect. This is not an "I told you so" post, for two reasons. First, of all the subjects for a blog, the horse race aspect of politics is among the least interesting to me, and there were plenty of more qualified experts to get things wildly wrong. Second, I haven't been blogging much over the last few years. Unlike when I started blogging 12 years ago, the blogosphere is now quite crowded. Just as importantly, around the start of 2015, in response to some life events and in anticipation of how unpleasant I thought this campaign would be, I just decided to focus on some other things and give myself the gift of not paying much attention in real time.

It didn't get nearly as unpleasant as I thought it would. We should actually consider ourselves a bit lucky.

For the record, I am a Republican, but I did not vote for Trump. I voted for John Kasich in the Vermont primary and Gary Johnson in yesterday's election. I simply refuse to vote for any candidate who gives clear signals that he or she will abuse power. For different but self-evident reasons, that disqualifies both Trump and Clinton. I would have voted the same way if I lived across the river in New Hampshire, where my vote might actually have mattered.

But I was also not part of this #NeverTrump movement among my fellow Republicans. Now that Trump is President-Elect, he needs support to govern from everybody. That includes me. I'll try to offer my best ideas and most thoughtful reflections from the blog, with greater frequency than during the long campaign. I will start with five ideas.

First, Trump should announce that he expects the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland's nomination before the session ends. He should not tell them his preference for whether Garland is confirmed or not. He should further scold the Republicans for not having acted on it sooner. Draining the swamp requires him to shine a light on political opportunism, regardless of which party exhibits the bad behavior. He owes no particular courtesy to Republicans who shied away from endorsing him, and so he should not spare them the criticism they deserve.

Second, he should acknowledge that our federal budget is on an unsustainable path. He should be clear with the new Congress that he expects a compromise like Simpson-Bowles, or something better, to be on his desk by Day 100. The problem is the baseline. Simpson-Bowles addresses that problem. Resetting the baseline so that it is sustainable does not absolve the Congress of its other fiscal duties, to modify the baseline annually to better reflect priorities as they evolve. This is an issue where we need to act sooner rather than later, and Presidential involvement is absolutely essential. Plus, his involvement gives Congress cover to do something politically unpopular but fiscally prudent. They might actually appreciate it. I make this suggestion in full recognition of the next one.

Third, he needs to recognize that his election coincides with a peak of the labor market, and things are only going to get more challenging from here. He needs to be thinking of rebuilding our decrepit infrastructure as a jobs program for the labor market dislocation that is sure to come. I have been preaching this for nearly 9 years now, most recently here, so I won't repeat all the details. Just make the process of setting priorities as transparent as possible.

Fourth, he should announce that he plans to have national or international summits on key policy issues for each of his first twelve months, led by his newly appointed cabinet officials and senior aides. Bringing the country together, and bringing it together with our fellow nations, requires a distinct forum for putting ideas into discussion. There is no shortage of topics -- race relations, immigration, international trade, education, surveillance, cooperation in the Americas, what's left of NATO, energy security, environmental degradation, homeland security, ... you name it. He should task his Vice President with organizing all of them, with the expectation that the lessons learned from each will inform his policy agenda over the coming years. (Yes, I am envisioning him in his role on The Apprentice as I write this.)

Fifth, he should get up to speed, like yesterday, on potential terrorist threats. The upheaval of this election is just what ISIS ordered. He needs to surround himself with a diversity of experts and listen to what they have to say.

More ideas and reflections to come.

Addendum:  A colleague points me to this recent book, The Politics of Resentment, claiming "Kathy Cramer got it right all along."

What's a Conservative Student to Do?

NPR interviewed three student editors of the Dartmouth Review, to get their perspective on the upcoming New Hampshire primary.  The most interesting part comes near the end:

On The Anti-Intellectualism That Some See Starting To Define The Party
Neff: "There is an intellectual atrophy. Republicans use to be the party of strong fiscal policy. Now it is the party of tax cuts. It's not an intellectual approach to just talk about cutting taxes. I feel there's a lot of populism choking off what could be cool new ideas. On education, on immigration."

Riley: "The most troubling part of the rightward shift, for someone like me who believes in evolution and the climate change issue, has been the anti-intellectualism that has infected that. I don't know if candidates actually believe what they're saying, or are just saying dumb things intentionally to appeal to the lowest common denominator."

If You Want To Advance the Centrist Democratic Agenda ...

... then you might hope that Romney wins the election in November.  Here's my thinking on this crazy notion.

We know what Washington looks like if Obama is President but the Democrats don't have the House and don't have 60 votes in the Senate.  Republicans dig in.  The Democratic agenda doesn't move forward.  It's gridlock.  If Obama is re-elected but the Congress doesn't shift strongly Democratic, we can expect more of the same. That's just the way it is with Republicans on Capitol Hill these days.  We can speculate as to whether House Republicans would feel more or less empowered opposing a re-elected Obama.  Maybe less right after the election, but growing over time as Obama becomes more of a lame duck President.  And history doesn't favor an improvement for the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections if they control the White House.

But now consider what happens if it is President Romney.  We can presume that if there was enough sentiment to make that happen, the Republicans will not have lost ground in Congress.  So what is Romney's record in the organizations that he has run?  It has been pointed out many times that he does not seem to be driven by ideological principles.  It is less often emphasized what he is driven by.  He is results oriented.  He tries to turn things around and add value.  It was true at Bain.  It was true in the 2002 Winter Olympics.  And, most instructively, it was true of his time as Governor of Massachusetts. 

So how would a President Romney get things done?  He wouldn't make the mistake of trying to transcend politics.  He would play politics to the hilt.  Unencumbered by restrictive ideological principles, he would work very hard to get 60 votes in the Senate while retaining a majority in the House, so that he could take credit for the results while he's in office. The need to get those 60 votes in the Senate is what allows the centrist part of the Democratic agenda to move forward.

I believe that the way to understand the Romney campaign is simply to acknowledge that his ambition is to be the guy in charge who gets things done on the grandest scale possible.  That means being President.  Nothing he has to say or do in the process of getting elected will substantially affect what he does when he gets there.  And that would be good news for centrist Democrats, even if it would be a bitter pill to swallow.

Quick Reactions to the Iowa Caucus

The results from Iowa with over 90 percent of precincts reporting show Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in a dead heat with 25 percent of the vote each, with Ron Paul third with 21 percent of the vote. 

This is not a surprise.  The Republican party has three factions: religious conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians.  Each faction is represented by one of these three candidates (in the order listed above).  What shifted over the past few months was which candidate would represent the religious conservatives.  It turned out to be Santorum, rather than Bachmann or Perry.

The Iowa caucus is not supposed to determine the nominee.  It is primarily the media circus surrounding it that makes it appear to be more consequential than it is.  Ezra Klein had a good post on this a day ago.  Iowa matters beyond the delegates it awards because it provides information that is useful to others who are deciding which candidate to support -- and because an abysmal showing might convince a marginal candidate to drop out of the race.  That might be Bachmann here.  Huntsman ignored Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, and Perry might as well hold on until South Carolina.

Grassroots Leaders Like Me

My latest letter from Tim Morgan began like this:

Dear Friend,

I don't want to believe you've abandoned the Republican Party, but I have to ask . . . Have you given up?

Our records show that we have not yet received your Republican National Committee membership renewal for the critical 2008 presidential election year.

As the Treasurer of the RNC, I know our Party's success depends directly on grassroots leaders like you.

So I am surprised and concerned especially because I know how generously you supported President Bush and the RNC in the past. You helped to advance our vision for America and elect Republicans at all levels of government.

I know other things come up, and perhaps you've just been delayed in renewing your membership. If that's the case, I understand.

But we've not heard from you this year -- and I hope you haven't deserted our Party.

Call me crazy, but I don't think "Have you given up?" is ready to stand toe-to-toe with "Yes We Can" in the general election. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn't desert the Republican Party, ...

Krugman's Keys to a Landslide Victory

The phrase "Obama Derangement Syndrome" has entered public usage. It seems to have two strains. The first is adulation for Senator Obama beyond what can be linked to his accomplishments in public office. The second is the more usual strain, irrational dislike, which has to date infected a number of Democrats, but none more publicly than Paul Krugman. He continues his quest to be the poster boy for ODS in his New York Times column today, "Deliverance or Diversion." Stay with this excerpt until the punchline:

But Mr. Obama, instead of emphasizing the harm done by the other party’s rule, likes to blame both sides for our sorry political state. And in his speeches he promises not a rejection of Republicanism but an era of postpartisan unity.

That — along with his adoption of conservative talking points on the crucial issue of health care — is why Mr. Obama’s rise has caused such division among progressive activists, the very people one might have expected to be unified and energized by the prospect of finally ending the long era of Republican political dominance.

Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version of Michael Bloomberg instead.

Others, however, insist that Mr. Obama’s message of hope and his personal charisma will yield an overwhelming electoral victory, and that he will implement a dramatically progressive agenda.

The trouble is that faith in Mr. Obama’s transformational ability rests on surprisingly little evidence.

Mr. Obama’s ability to attract wildly enthusiastic crowds to rallies is a good omen for the general election; so is his ability to raise large sums. But neither necessarily points to a landslide victory.

So, in this installment of Krugman's anti-Obama screed, Democrats are supposed to be concerned about Senator Obama winning the nomination because it is not clear that he can secure a landslide victory in the general election. And if they believed him, and thought twice about voting for Senator Obama in the remaining primaries, they would instead vote for Senator Clinton.

Going first to personalities, is it really Krugman's contention that the odds of a Democratic landslide victory are higher with Senator Clinton than with Senator Obama as the nominee? Going next to tactics, is it really Krugman's contention that the odds of a Democratic landslide victory are higher with Senator Obama campaigning to the political left of where he is now? Or that they are higher if he makes partisan rhetoric a more central part of his campaign? If he holds any of these views, then he's got precious little company among rational people in holding them.

I don't doubt that Krugman and many others would be happier if they could implement a more so-called progressive agenda as a result of the 2008 election. But this group does not comprise a majority of the voting public, to say nothing of a landslide majority. Absent that majority, the candidate needs to have appeal beyond the political left.

And, yes, many people -- myself included -- do fault the Republicans of the last several years for the poor state of public policy today. They've had the presidency since 2001 and majorities in Congress over much of that time. To not hold them responsible would be ridiculous. But that does not mean that we would opt for government by a 51% majority in the opposite direction if there is a possibility of something based more on a broad-based, politically centrist consensus. People seeking that consensus will be voting for Senator McCain or Senator Obama.

Ethics Reform in Louisiana

The most interesting excerpt of a very interesting tale of Louisiana politics in today's New York Times:

In a town where legislators have been known to proclaim paid-for meals a principal draw to public service, this was an especially unpopular move. Last week, State Representative Charmaine L. Marchand of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans said the limit would force her and her colleagues to dine at Taco Bell, and urged that it be pushed to $75 per person, to give them “wiggle room.”

No public groundswell took up her cause, and the $50 limit held.

Read the whole thing, and hope for more good things from Governor Jindal.

Ferraro on Superdelegates

Geraldine Ferraro owns up to having created the superdelegate process in 1982 when she was the vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus. The first part of this New York Times op-ed is a reasonable historical retelling. But then she falters, as do all justifications of this system. Here's the key excerpt:

Today, with the possibility that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will end up with about the same number of delegates after all 50 states have held their primaries and caucuses, the pundits and many others are saying that superdelegates should not decide who the nominee will be. That decision, they say, should rest with the rank-and-file Democrats who went to the polls and voted.

But the superdelegates were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country. I would hope that is why many superdelegates have already chosen a candidate to support.

Besides, the delegate totals from primaries and caucuses do not necessarily reflect the will of rank-and-file Democrats. Most Democrats have not been heard from at the polls. We have all been impressed by the turnout for this year’s primaries — clearly both candidates have excited and engaged the party’s membership — but, even so, turnout for primaries and caucuses is notoriously low. It would be shocking if 30 percent of registered Democrats have participated.

If that is the case, we could end up with a nominee who has been actively supported by, at most, 15 percent of registered Democrats. That’s hardly a grassroots mandate.

More important, although many states like New York have closed primaries in which only enrolled Democrats are allowed to vote, in many other states Republicans and independents can make the difference by voting in Democratic primaries or caucuses.

Whatever its imperfections, whether genuine (low turnout) or alleged (open primaries), the nominating process is not improved by resolving a close race for pledged delegates with backroom deals for superdelegates. Read the rest of the op-ed, where her partisan interests become evident.

Delegates that Steal?

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein step up to the plate to argue for a positive role that superdelegates can play in the Democratic nominating process in their New York Times op-ed, "Delegates of Steel." To put it charitably, they whiff. Their thesis:

But a review of the history of superdelegates suggests they are likely to play a constructive role in resolving the nomination before the convention and in unifying the party for the general election campaign.

Strike One. Either the superdelegates vote to support the candidate who received more pledged delegates, in which case they are irrelevant, or they vote to support the candidate who did not receive more pledged delegates, in which case they overturn the democratic process.

Working up to their big finish, the authors claim:

In 2008, where two strong and capable candidates are fighting it out on every front, where the difficult issues of race and sex are on the table and where the gap between the two in total votes and pledged delegates is likely to be small, the potential for an explosive convention, where in the end half the delegates (and half the party) feels they have been cheated, is real.

Strike Two. If the candidate with slightly more pledged delegates receives the nomination, then half the delegates (and half the party) will feel like they lost a close contest to a worthy rival. Small problem. If the candidate with more pledged delegates does not receive the nomination, then half the delegates (and half the party) will feel like they have been cheated. Big problem.

And that big finish:

In this case, the nomination could come down to a difficult and complex credentials battle over whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida. To have a nomination settled in this way is a bit like having an election settled by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court. Averting this kind of disaster is just what superdelegates are supposed to do.

Strike Three. It is the substitution of the views of the (bought and paid for) superdelegates for those of the voting citizenry that makes the nomination a bit like having an election settled by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court. There need not be a difficult and complex credentials battle. If the DNC wants to allow Michigan and Florida to have a voice in selecting the nominee, then it should schedule contested primaries in both states near the end of the primary season to choose those delegates. If it does not, based on its prior decisions, then the delegates don't get seated.

The current system is not perfect. Introducing superdelegates makes it further from perfect.

Super Delegates

Matthew Mosk and Paul Kane, writing in today's Washington Post, show just how sleazy the courtship of super delegates has become. This is a train wreck waiting to happen. If the choices of the super delegates overturn the choices of the directly elected delegates, this will not end well for the Democratic Party.

Governor Romney Takes His Leave

At today's CPAC conference, Mitt Romney departed the Republican primary field. Given the way he campaigned, I am not sorry to see him go. I was sorry to see the way he campaigned.

I have two grievances about his New Hampshire campaign. First, he just didn't show up. I direct a Public Policy Center at a college in New Hampshire. I didn't meet him. I met Senator McCain, Governor Huckabee, Congressman Paul, Congressman Tancredo, and unfortunately missed Congressman Hunter's event on campus. I saw the Mitt-mobile around town once or twice and was introduced to one of Governor Romney's sons by a student trying to bring Governor Romney to campus for a public lecture. What was he doing that he didn't have time to hit one of the few major colleges in the state?

Second, I know what he was doing with some of that time--spending his own money to saturate the primetime televsion hours with superficial, cynical, negative television ads. That's a fast way to alienate New Hampshire voters. It's one of the virtues of having the first primary here. The New Hampshire primary is designed for what McCain did--a rampage of townhall meetings where he took Q&A from the audience until they were satisfied he had heard and understood their concerns. And don't get me started again about Romney in Michigan.

Here's the irony. Based on his record and his personal resources, Governor Romney could have had the nomination in a walk. A Republican president in 2009 would have to work with a Democratically controlled legislature and would face a number of tough challenges. Maybe Governor Romney hasn't been keeping up with current events, but he actually faced an even more extreme version of that scenario in Massachusetts and had a reasonable record to show for it. All he had to do was to make the case that he worked with the Democrats to deliver results for the citizens of his state while holding the line on conservative issues. The problem with Senator McCain's record is that he has not held the line on conservative principles in his commendable efforts in the Senate to work with Democrats to deliver results. (Campaign finance and immigration are two prime examples.) An honest and positive campaign on that issue, without the free-lunch, supply-side economic rhetoric and the negative ads, would have generated a lot of support.

Two Ideas for the Primary System

Having watched the primary season unfold from a very nice vantage point, I think that the nomination processes would have been better served by approval voting. From a potentially long list of candidates, voters simply vote for as many of them as they find acceptable. The candidate with the most votes wins.

The main advantage of approval voting is that it allows voters the opportunity to express a preference for more than one candidate. The drawback to approval voting is that it does not provide voters with the opportunity to rank candidates within the set that they find acceptable. With approval voting, we wouldn't see primary voters having to worry about "wasting a vote" in expressing a preference for a candidate who has little chance of achieving a plurality. There would be less pressure on candidates to drop out of the race if they don't "win" one of the early states. This is particularly important given how much weight the early primaries seem to have.

I also find it odd that the national parties award delegates in proportion to a state's total population rather than some other measure that considers the distribution of voters across the two main parties. Consider the case of New York. There is almost no chance that it will go for the Republican candidate in the general election, regardless of the nominees from the two parties. So Senator Clinton's victory there tells us nothing about whether she is a more viable Democratic candidate in the electoral college than is Senator Obama. Ditto for Senator McCain.

It seems like a party could get a more viable candidate by awarding more delegates to states that are expected to be more competitive in the general election and fewer delegates to states that are expected to be less competitive in the general election. There is a limit to how much downweighting could be done in a state in which the party is strong--that would encourage state party leaders to discourage turnout, which is unhealthy to say the very least. But some movement in this direction could be helpful.

Storehouses of Ideas

I hadn't realized that Chris DeMuth is stepping down as the president of the American Enterprise Institute. Here is an essay he wrote reflecting on the nature and role of think tanks. I thought the following excerpt was interesting:

I have tried to explain it to people who have been setting up liberal and leftist think tanks in recent years, advising them that the secret of success is to go away and spend thirty years in the political wilderness. They have thought I was joking. Let me try again here.

Every one of the right-of-center think tanks was founded in a spirit of opposition to the established order of things. Opposition is the natural proclivity of the intellectual (it's what leads some smart people to become intellectuals rather than computer programmers), and is of course prerequisite to criticism and devotion to reform. And for conservatives, opposition lasted a very long time--in domestic policy, from the New Deal through 1980.

It's been more than half that period of time since 1980, and the conservative think tanks are now part of the status quo and not the political wilderness. Maybe the Lefties aren't the only ones who could benefit from a few day hikes.

Read the whole thing.