Mark Schmitt

A Superb New Map of American Politics

The Massachusetts think-tank that publishes Commonwealth magazine has gone beyond the borders of the Bay State to put out a regional analysis of U.S. politics that goes well-beyond the dance of the Red States and Blue states.

The article, with sidebars analyzing each region, is here.

The 10 regions created under this analysis are roughly equal in number of eligible voters. But the regions cut through states and in some cases are not even contiguous (the region called "Upper Coasts" includes the Portlands in Oregon and Maine, as well as Seattle, Boston, Northern California, and Vermont) so they're not the best way to understand what it takes to win the Electoral College. But as a way to see some of the basic dynamics underlying the shifts in the recent American politics, this is one of the freshest, most solid analyses I've seen in many years, probably since the introduction of serious cluster analysis into polling in the late 1980s, led by the Pew Center on the People, Press and Politics, which divided voters into groups based on their underlying attitudes.

The author, Robert David Sullivan, takes frequent, well-deserved shots at the kind of polling now being done using that kind of cluster analysis, particularly the artificial categories like "soccer moms," "office-park dads," and "wired workers" created in particular by the Clintons' favorite pollster, Mark Penn. This point can't be made often enough or strongly enough: these manufactured categories, which enrapture politicians, are very dangerous for understanding politics. That's because they have no fixed meaning. A pollster creates them out of a single poll, and then redefines them or drops them when they cease to seem useful. There's no history to test them against, no actual voting patterns to check.

And Penn's approach is being put to the test in the real world right now, in the sad campaign of Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has been convinced by Penn to position himself in a place where, simply put, there are no voters.

The gold standard in any analysis of American politics is county-level voting data, which is what this regional breakdown really is. (The lines defining the regions are county lines.) Unlike states, counties are usually relatively cohesive units, either urban or suburban, rich or poor. And the county data is real and can be tested over time. Anyone can talk about red states, blue states and swing states, but it takes a lot of discipline, data, and insight to understand the United States in terms of 3000 counties and their voting patterns. Kevin Phillips made his name with that sort of analysis, and I'm pretty sure Karl Rove is one of those people who can reel off county voting stats from memory, which is the source of his influence. Together with The Emerging Democratic Majority, this analysis is one of the few that can aggregate such a detailed analysis into a big picture that's reasonably accessible.

And kudos to Commonwealth for publishing this. It's a very good magazine that might be ready to reach beyond Massachusetts.

Another $80-some Billion Down the Tubes

Business Week (which I wouldn't normally bother to read, but it shows up at our house and has actually been really good on Washington coverage lately) seems to be the only publication to pick up the issue that I thought was the single most disturbing aspect of the Medicare bill: the huge tax giveaway to companies that already provide retiree prescription drug benefits to "incentivize" them to keep doing so.

When I last commented on this, the number I had seen was $70 billion. In the end, apparently, it reached $86 billion, just $1 billion short of the supplemental cost for operations in Iraq that was so upsetting to people. And yet this has happened with almost no notice at all. Twenty-two cents of every dollar in the Medicare bill will go to this corporate tax subsidy.

Business Week confirms what had been my instinct: that these tax breaks will go to companies that would continue to provide retiree coverage anyway, or are bound to do so by long-term labor agreements, while the companies that want to drop coverage and can drop coverage will do so anyway. In other words, in addition to the fact that not one penny of this $86 billion tax break will improve the current conditions of life for any American, most of it will not even serve the purpose intended.

BW Online | December 15, 2003 | Commentary: Medicare's $86 Billion Band-Aid (requires registration)

[The bill] also threatens the nearly 12 million retirees who now get drug insurance from their former employers. The reason: With a government-financed option now available, many companies will consider dumping coverage and letting Medicare provide drugs for their retirees instead.

To prevent such a shift, Congress bought a little insurance of its own: It set aside $86 billion to induce employers to keep providing prescription drug benefits over the next decade. Problem is, much of that funding will be wasted. That's because it will provide a windfall for some employers unlikely ever to drop coverage. And it isn't enough to forestall others from joining the trend toward slashing retiree benefits. In fact, the new legislation will allow some companies to blame Washington for dropped coverage. "Retirees will get a letter from their former employer that begins, 'Due to recent legislative changes in Congress..."' says Heritage Foundation health policy analyst Edmund F. Haislmaier.

WHY DIDN'T CONGRESS design a better solution? Mostly, because nobody can think of one -- short of redesigning the entire Medicare program, a step Congress rejected. The subsidy may have its flaws, but without it, most retirees would wind up with Medicare coverage, which is less comprehensive than private plans.

That conclusion, though, is maddeningly weak. The article pretty solidly establishes that many retirees will end up shifted to Medicare coverage anyway, and that those who won't, wouldn't have been shifted even without the subsidy. In other words, it is entirely likely that there would be zero net difference in employer coverage of retiree drug benefits as a result of the tax break. So how is this the only solution anyone could think of? How about the alternative of a stick instead of a carrot? Companies that cut off benefits could have been denied existing tax breaks for their executives' health benefits. Or, Democrats could have offered a plan focused on catastrophic coverage. Instead of cutting off drug coverage completely at $2400 in costs, real insurance would mean coverage that starts at about that level, and covers everything above a certain amount. It would be cheaper for the insured, cheaper for the taxpayer, and it would actually avoid this problem, because it would be complementary to most retiree plans, rather than duplicative.

That $86 billion, by the way, is likely to be much more in the next ten years. Just another big slice out of our long-term ability to fix Social Security, deal with future recessions, repair the entire health care system, etc. There ought to be more outrage.

So What Is the Right Education Policy for a Democrat?

Ruy Teixera did me the favor of a nice plug in his useful and insightful blogThe Emerging Democratic Majority WebLog - DonkeyRising

In this post, he picks up on some discussions of General Clark's viability to suggest that Clark needs to claim own one key domestic issue as his own -- and he suggests that it be education. That's a good point -- actually, for any candidate. It follows on a point that Ruy has made in the past: that the Democratic campaign will have to be based on the "three E's" -- Economy, Environment, Education. (And 'ealth care!)

Of his three E's, education is the one that's still most in play. All of the candidates are working on how to talk about the economy, although I still believe that only John Edwards has a message and language that works equally well when the GDP is up and the unemployment rate down as when they're the other way around. (Perhaps the language will soon fall into the public domain.) On the environment, the advocacy and political groups such as the League of Conservation Voters are strong and have learned how to get their voters out, many of the issues are local, and Bush has made not the slightest attempt to cover his flank on any environmental issue, so that one almost takes care of itself. That leaves education, where Bush has made an effort, and where the alternative message is still a little unclear. As Ruy suggests, Clark could be the bearer of this message, but so could any of the other candidates. Usually governors are in the best position to talk knowledgeably about education, since they are actually running school systems, which is why Dean had such an instinctive sense that No Child Left Behind was a disaster. The candidates from the congressional party voted for it, but afterward, put it out of their mind until it comes up for reauthorization.

Education is a perfect example of the limits of the liberal politics of "more," as I discussed in a post a few days ago. Let's say, for example, that the Democratic message is that No Child Left Behind is a false promise because it's been under-funded. What does Bush do

The Supreme Court Upholds McCain-Feingold

I feel as though I should have some profound commentary on the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). I know a lot about it; I even helped put the funding together for the legal defense. But reading the decision through quickly, my reaction was that it seemed anti-climactic. Congress wrote a law that was constitutional; the Court held it to be constitutional. The alignments were not surprising, the result not unduly complex. Perhaps the only surprise was that the Court fairly easily rejected the plaintiffs strongest argument, which was that the provision limiting ads that mention a candidate right before the elction was overbroad.

Long ago, right after the law passed, former Federal Elections Commission chair Trevor Potter cut through the thicket of arguments to make clear that the Supreme Court had, over several decades, laid out some very specific markers of the kinds of restrictions that it would permit in a campaign finance law, and BCRA followed those markers quite carefully, with one or two exceptions. (Read Potter's original article here )

The lower court decision in May, which was really non-decision as it was three separate and overlapping opinions by three judges who could not even agree on a set of facts, invited a lot of analysis, and seemed to pose the possibility that the Court would render an equally complex decision, since it didn't really have the option of upholding or overturning the lower court. But that was misleading. The Supreme Court has visited these issues again and again; it's not a great mystery what the rules are, and the congressional sponsors had superb legal advice, from Potter, from Fred Wertheimer, from the Brennan Center for Justice and many others. And they took the advice, which is good.

The flip side of this point is that the Court has marked out both what is permissible in campaign reform, and what it would hold unconstitutional. And there isn't a lot of room to further limit money beyond what's in this bill. Certainly the independent organizations being put together to generally boost Democrats and Republicans next year, which can't run ads mentioning candidates and can't coordinate with candidates, cannot be limited. And it would be difficult to imagine limiting issue ads that occur well before an election, such as the Bush ad accusing Democrats of opposing tough action against terrorism, a classic soft money ad, which might influence the election were it not laughable.

That means that the best opportunity for further reform is not to keep chasing after "loopholes," or non-loopholes, but to build some counterweights to this kind of money, in the form of public financing, as in Arizona or New York City, or free broadcast time for candidates. Those have to be the next step in reform.

Finally, an interesting paragraph jumped out of the opinion, all of which is a well-written, clear statement of the problem and the logic of the solution:

Plaintiffs argue that without concrete evidence of an instance in which a federal officeholder has actually switched a vote (or, presumably, evidence of a specific instance where the public believes a vote was switched), Congress has not shown that there exists real or apparent corruption. But the record is to the contrary. The evidence connects soft money to manipulations of the legislative calendar, leading to Congress. failure to enact, among other things, generic drug legislation, tort reform, and tobacco legislation. Donations from the tobacco industry to Republicans scuttled tobacco legislation, just as contributions from the trial lawyers to Democrats stopped tort reform. To claim that such actions do not change legislative outcomes surely misunderstands the legislative process.

Well put.

The trippy scenario

I attended a lunch back in July, or maybe even August, at which Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, sketched out the months to come. By the end of September, he predicted, Dean would have 150,000 names on the internet, some huge amount of money, and solid leads in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. At that point, he predicted, the Democratic establishment, such as it is, might coalesce behind some alternative candidate, but it would be too late. By December, he predicted, the other candidates would have no choice but to drop out and get behind Dean or risk a "donnybrook" that would hurt the party.

At the time, I thought this was nuts. In an e-mail to the friend who invited me to the lunch, I called it the "trippy" lunch because it seemed so delusional. After all, at the time, Dean's only real acccomplishment was to have almost knocked down the balsa-wood simulacrum of a presidential candidate that is John Kerry. And I don't think there's anything necessarily destructive about having some healthy primary elections, in which people actually get to cast some votes. There's a lot of room between having a few real votes and the kind of "donnybrook" that hurts the Democratic nominee, the last of which was Kennedy vs. Carter in 1980. It's a little offensive to my democratic instincts to choose the nominee based on polls and meet-ups. I came away far warier of Dean, but mostly because I thought this hyper-confidence would be self-destructive.

But here we are in December, and I must have been wrong: all the major pieces of Trippi's trippy scenario are falling into place. There will, without a doubt, soon be just one candidate remaining as an alternative to Dean, and, in keeping with my earlier predictions, I still think that candidate will be Clark. (My scenario, in which Kerry's free-fall opens up second place in New Hampshire for Clark, first put forward five weeks ago , is now almost the conventional wisdom.) But the Clark challenge could fade as well. He'll need more than "electability" to make his case, because he'll have to regain some of the real intense enthusiasm that characterized his earliest supporters, and electability alone can't produce that energy. Also, the logic of a Dean-Clark or maybe a Clark-Dean ticket is so strong that both may really pull their punches in order to avoid the ugly quotes that come back at them in the general election.

The Gore endorsement doesn't end things, I don't think, but it certainly helps. I assume Gore can be very helpful to Dean in Iowa, and probably can help move him into the race in South Carolina (the one state where he's currently invisible), and strengthen his credibility with African-American voters. But what really got me thinking about learning to live with Dean was the article in the Times magazine this weekend about Dean's fanatical supporters. Even if Dean can be defeated for the nomination by the right combination of candidate and events, there is going to be a large group of people who will feel he was robbed. I remember the 1992 convention, with Jerry Brown's crew of young supporters and delegates, a tiny subset of the Dean following, completely convinced that their man had had the nomination stolen from him, even though he hadn't won anything. It was actually an ugly and disruptive scene. Now multiply it by 1,000. The people who dropped out of grad school or left their families or started their own blogs or whatever for Howard Dean are not going to quietly accept that he lost the nomination, if he loses the nomination. (In other words, the threat of a "donnybrook" is actually a dagger that Dean is holding over the party.)

As for electability, which is the only thing that matters to me, I look at it as a simple matter of arithmetic: We've got a president who once had an approval rating in the 70s (excluding the 91% on Sept. 12, 2001, when all of us desperately wanted to believe Bush was competent) but who's now hovering between the high 40s and the mid-50s. Twenty percent of voters now say they are "willing to consider" voting for someone else. That means that a sizable population, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, are people who once liked George Bush but are now either disappointed or rethinking the matter. Dean is a perfect candidate for the 30% who never liked Bush, which includes almost everyone I know and certainly Al Gore! Clark, I've argued, is a good candidate for those who used to like him but no longer do, which is why I have no problem with the fact that he once said optimistic things about the Bush foreign policy team. He is himself one of the disappointed, and that's why he speaks to them. The combination could be perfect. So the question for Dean is whether he can reach the disappointed as successfully as he reached the never-liked-hims.

Part of Dean's argument is that he will bring new people into the process, whether people who never voted before or had never been reached out to by a straight-talking Democrat. I agree with that ambition, very much so. It's an important change from the Democratic party of the Clinton-Gore era, when the assumption was very much that the electorate is what it is, that winning a vote away from the other guy is worth twice as much as bringing in a new voter, and the only hope is to concentrate every effort on that small group of swing voters near the fiftieth percentile. But there are plenty of disappointeds among the non-voters, too. If the Democratic nominee cannot reach the huge number of Americans who at one time liked Bush, there is no way to make up for that with new voters.

And that's what keeps me awake at night. On the other hand, if Dean's going to be the nominee eventually, the sooner he can get started on figuring out how to reach this very different group of voters and non-voters, the better. And I have to admit, the very audacity of the trippy scenario might be just what we need, to confront a political machine whose greatest asset is its own audacity and willingness to make its own rules.

A Dozen Amazing College Students

I gave a talk today to a group of college students, mostly about campaign finance reform. Over the past few years, I've done that three or four times a year, and I love doing it -- every time I wonder why I didn't become an academic. (I know why, but that's another story.) Talking about campaign finance reform is not my favorite thing, however. In my experience, most college students and even law students don't seem to have enough background to put the issue in context, and they view it as a set of technicalities that most politicians will evade anyway. Most have never voted and certainly not given money to a politician (unless their wealthy parents put their name on a check), so it's just not an issue that's interesting to them.

But today's talk was the complete opposite. These 12 or so students were totally knowledgeable about the issues. They'd read two long essays that I'd written on the subject -- thoroughly, quoting passages back to me and challenging my assumptions -- along with all kinds of other materials, like a George Will column attacking campaign finance reform, and proposals to change the New York City public financing system. Every single student asked at least one question, most of which were profound and difficult to answer. One student, for example, asked me whether my apparent belief that the United States should be an inclusive society that encouraged broad participation and a sense of mutual obligation stemmed from my own religious beliefs, and, if not, then from what source did I derive that moral certainty? Another, in the course of asking a question about free broadcast time for political candidates made as good a case for requiring broadcasters to meet a set of public obligations as I've ever heard. I don't really mean to single those two out, because every question was based on serious thinking about American history, democratic theory, and current events.

This class was at the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York. It's a maximum security prison, and the students are enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (scroll down for info), the only full liberal arts program in the New York state prison system. The students get Bard College credits, at no cost, for their work in these very serious classes, many of which are taught by senior faculty of the college.

It's worth noting, in light of what I said about college students above, that these students cannot vote, and in many states, they would be prohibited for life from exercising their rights as citizens of a democracy.

In a number of posts recently, I've looked back on some of the ugly things that happened in Congress in the 1994 crime bill, which in my mind is the watershed moment when the Gingrich conservatives took control, even more than the 1994 elections, and the beginning of most of the more recent ugliness. Mostly I've focused on the implications for the congressional process. But there were very serious substantive results as well. One of those was the denial of Pell Grants for prison education programs. This was a classic example of the bullshit, slogan politics of that time, and now: "why should criminals get a college education?" But the result was not trivial: there had been 70 college programs in New York's correctional facilities in 1994, and that number went to zero after the crime bill and before the Bard Initiative started. It was one of the many huge mistakes of the last decade, and one that should be reversed as soon as possible.

Medicare Post-Mortem II -- The Message and the Liberal Quandary

As I more or less concluded in a previous post, there may be have been nothing that could have been done to restrain a congressional/presidential majority that is determined to pass a particular piece of legislation and is altogether indifferent to the cost, the details, the effects of the legislation as long as they can shovel a few hundred billion dollars to their friends. And it's too much to expect a coherent opposition message to develop when a bill is voted on three days after being unveiled, and there are perhaps a dozen things terribly wrong with it.

Still, there was something missing from the opposition message on the Medicare bill. Most frustrating to this observer was the ease with which the opposition allowed its message to be portrayed as merely wanting more benefits from the bill. This allowed countless supporters of the bill, the reluctant as well as the enthusiastic, to portray the bill as if it were a happy medium between the liberals who wanted more and the conservatives who wanted less. If both extremes were unhappy, supporters said over and over again, then there must be something right in the bill. This was how the debate was depicted in most of the press as well, with the exception of the Washington Post. And conservatives, in their own post-mortems on the bill, have glibly fallen back on the assumption that a Democratic alternative would have been even more costly and more expansive.

And yet, nothing could be farther from the truth. Opponents of the bill would have been happy with far less, certainly far less spending. This is provable: In 2000, President Clinton introduced a prescription drug bill, basically to flesh out a Gore campaign promise. Its ten-year cost was $253 billion, 40% cheaper than the $400 billion program just passed. And because it would have taken effect immediately, whereas the new law waits until 2006, its ten-year cost was really a ten-year cost, whereas the $400 billion covers just seven years of drug benefits. Unlike the bill just passed, the Clinton proposal did not have a "donut hole," the gap between $2200 in costs and $5000 in which no benefits at all are paid. Unlike the bill just passed, it provided real security, in the form of a "stop-loss" at $4,000 in out-of-pocket costs, above which 100% of drug costs would be covered. Unlike the bill just passed, premiums would have been set $25 a month in the first year, rather than some-amount-that-is-probably-likely-to-average-about-$35.

There's certainly been some inflation in prescription drug costs since 2000, but a bill that allowed the federal government to modestly exercise its buying power in exchange for the massive new market created for the pharmaceutical industry could surely have held those costs down. The difference between a solid $250 billion bill and a full-of-holes $400 billion bill is all the crap loaded onto the so-called conservative bill: the bribes to companies to induce them to provide insurance they would not otherwise want to offer, bribes to other companies to induce them not to drop their coverage, another massive tax giveaway to the well-off in the form of Health Savings Accounts, etc., etc.

Why is it so difficult for liberals to offer any alternative other than "more"? So long as liberalism is defined principally by its greater generosity, more benefits, more taxes, more government, etc., it will be vulnerable to the manipulations of quasi-conservatives who can spend recklessly to buy power, always protected by the assumption that the liberals' alternative would be even more reckless.

I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago when I saw the elegant zinger that Brad DeLong took at the expense of poor Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew Sullivan despairs when he contemplates the future of America:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: I know I'm a broken record on this but we truly need some kind of third force again in American politics - fiscally conservative, socially inclusive, and vigilant against terror...

It was called the Clinton Administration, Mr. Sullivan.

And you and your friends spent a decade trying (unsuccessfully) as hard as you could to wreck it.

Well put. But while the Clinton administration was, in practice, the most fiscally conservative/responsible in decades, this characterizes its practice in governing, not really its politics. Clinton was elected on "Putting People First," which was not about fiscal conservatism but about economic stimulus, education, service, etc.. It was Paul Tsongas who in the 1992 primaries represented the "third force" Sullivan now calls for (at least on the first two fronts; "vigilant against terror" wasn't a distinction with a difference between politicians then -- or now.) And in the general election of 1992, it was Ross Perot who was the voice of fiscal conservatism, peeling those voters concerned about that issue away from George H. W. Bush, while freeing Clinton to preach a more traditional Democratic message, albeit a restrained one.

(As I think about this, I can't help but remember the longest conversation I ever had with Andrew Sullivan, which was at a dinner in 1991 when as the editor of The New Republic he was announcing that "we have decided" that the governor of Arkansas would not only be the next president but a heroic leader, and I was expressing just a little bit of skepticism.)

"Fiscal conservatism" has never been a winning political message, at least not for Democrats. It is an abstraction, a limit, not the thing itself that people want from government. For the Right, fiscal conservatism has been a winning message, probably because it's really code for low taxes and minimal regulation, even though actual fiscal conservatism has to mean getting the long-term balance between revenues and spending right.

But there has to be a way to use the reality, now proven over at least four presidential administrations, that Democrats are responsible, moderate, and get more out of government for less, while Republicans are reckless, irresponsible, rob the future, and produce exactly the kind of government that we don't like. I don't know how best to convey that point, but as long as the distinguishing characteristic of liberalism is "more," we can't get that point across. We need a way to talk about the future, about security, about doing more with less, about letting the private sector do what it can do best but not insulating it from risk.

Increasingly, I think the only answer to this paradox is in something like the "Radical Centrism" of people like Ted Halstead, Michael Lind and, to some extent, Matthew Miller. I used to wish that this "centrism" could be called with it really is: good, responsible liberalism, updated for modern circumstances, respectful of the market, and thankfully stripped of its fuzzy thinking, sacred cows and special interests. But it's actually more than that, and we so clearly need a fresh start that the idea of the radical center can have the effect of clearing out the cobwebs and potentially restarting the debate, on some premise other than just "more." It can also allow us to start the tax debate fresh, rather than just falling into the trap of arguing about whether to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which is just another more vs. less argument.

On the other hand, for an almost-persuasive, though mean, critique of the Radical Center approach, see Bob Kuttner's review of Miller's recent book.

"I Blame Society"

Another postcard from the "Responsibility Era":

One of the many conservative pundits shocked by the Medicare bill is Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post. After recounting her discovery of its many offenses, she concludes, in a paragraph that might at first seem like columnist pablum until you realize how outrageous it is, that it's no one's fault at all:

Medicare: Malaise . . . (washingtonpost.com)

But in part, I wonder whether something else is happening too. It's as if we as a nation have lost our appetite for grand domestic policy debates. We have extended, national conversations about the fate of O.J. Simpson or Rosie O'Donnell, and after Sept. 11, 2001, we rallied around the flag. But only twice, in recent memory, have we come together as a nation and vigorously pushed Congress to act on an issue of mass public concern. The first time, it was to pass a "Do Not Call Me at Home" law. The second time it was to pass a "Do Not Spam Me" law. As a nation, we adamantly reserve the right not to be hassled. As for everything else that Congress does -- it seems we are perfectly content not to know about it until the shouting's all over.

Does she not realize how incredibly hard certain people worked to prevent this domestic policy debate from taking place? Does she realize that not only the mystical "we as a nation" were aggressively excluded, but so were 93 elected Senators and several hundred members of the House of Representatives? Does she realize that there was a reason the bill was unveiled only a day before it was voted on in the middle of the night? Does she think these things just happened, and that men named Hastert, DeLay, Frist and Bush had nothing to do with them?

What came to mind as I read this paragraph was the great scene from the movie Repo Man, when Otto's friend, on his deathbed, says, "I know that a life of crime led me to this sorry fate. And yet, I blame society -- society made me what I am." To which Otto (Emilio Estevez) replies, "That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk, just like me."

Some people are longing for Martin Sheen to be the real president. I'd settle for one truth-telling Otto.