Mark Schmitt

Liberal/conservative rankings

I'll be watching the debate tonight with my daughter, so it's not an occasion for drinking games, but if it were, a good one would be to drink whenever Bush mentions that the National Journal ranked Kerry the most liberal Senator.

This reminded me that for many months I've intended to call attention to a fabulous database that attempts to develop a more iterative and open way of ranking the voting records of members of Congress: http://progressivepunch.org/. Rather than choosing votes, this system takes any vote on which a majority of "hard-core progressives" votes in one way, and ranks them and others in relation to the positions of that hard core. There's a bit of arbitrariness in the choice of the hard-core, but it still takes a little of the human judgment out of the equation. And, more interestingly, one could open up the system and rank members based on, say, all the Senators from the Northeast, or some other choice.

In any event, Kerry's ratings under this system are very interesting (This probably won't paste in neatly, so click here , scroll down to number 24, and click to see Kerry's rank on a dozen different issues. Only on Housing does he rank near the most liberal, and on issues of war and peace and justice, he is near the middle of the Senate:

ALL ISSUE CATEGORIES Rank Kerry, John (Sen - D) Progressive Score (%) Rank


All issues 85.72 24/100

Aid to Less Advantaged People, at Home & Abroad (15 subcategories) 71.25 45/100



Corporate Subsidies (12 subcategories) 71.43 17/100T



Education, Humanities, & the Arts (2 subcategories) 72.73 46/100



Environment (12 subcategories) 82.00 19/100



Fair Taxation (6 subcategories) 93.33 25/100T



Family Planning (2 subcategories) 28.57 53/100



Government Checks on Corporate Power (21 subcategories) 76.00 36/100



Health Care (12 subcategories) 52.00 46/100



Housing (2 subcategories) 100.00 1/89T



Human Rights & Civil Liberties (6 subcategories) 56.52 46/100



Justice for All: Civil and Criminal (7 subcategories) 55.00 45/100



Labor Rights (6 subcategories) 60.47 38/100



Making Government Work for Everyone, Not Just the Rich or Powerful (10 subcategories) 67.65 46/100



War & Peace (14 subcategories) 40.91 46/100T

Sinclair broadcasting

I'm actually impressed by how quickly activists came to realize that Sinclair Broadcasting's abuse of its news division to broadcast a Swift Boat advertorial was not an illegal contribution to the Bush campaign that should be dealt with by the courts, but their own decision, one that could be dealt with by a thoughtful and aggressive consumer response.

It does seem like the classic liberal response to an outrage is to assume there must be a law against it, and if not, there ought to be one. The conservatives, who in their (now long forgotten) traditional mode don't believe their ought to be a law governing every aspect of human behavior, more instinctively understand that using market power can be at least as effective.

I've been encouraged to post a link to the terrific database of Sinclair advertisers hosted by the media reform organization Free Press, so here it is: http://www.sinclairwatch.org/act More effective, as others have suggested, is to contact local advertisers on a Sinclair station, and also the station managers, as well as mutual funds that have major Sinclair investments.

This has all been covered elsewhere, but there's a small point about why this will work: It's not because the advertisers might be sympathetic Kerry supporters, though they might be. It's not because the sales manager is really convinced that the advertisers will pull their ads. It's because these are ordinary business people, and they don't want anything to do with hassle or controversy. When they call the Sinclair corporate headquarters, they're going to say, "Why the hell do I have ten people calling me up about this? What do we need this for?"

This reminds me of another great effort that I know a little bit about: One of the aspects of Tom DeLay's vile "K Street Project" to force Washington lobbyists to hire Republicans and back Republican causes involves directing corporate funding to a lot of far-, far-right organizations like Focus on the Family, as well as some more explicitly political organizations. Noticing this, a small group of people who knew how to do this stuff started, with very little money, to file shareholder resolutions calling on companies that were funding these things to (1) Disclose any corporate contributions to political advocacy organizations, (2) Disclose their policy on such contributions, and (3) explain the business purpose of the contributions.

They particularly targetted national companies that tried to have pretty good reputations. For example, companies that took pride in good domestic-partner benefits but were giving to anti-gay organizations or companies with good labor relations giving to extreme right-to-work groups. There's more information about the whole project here.

If you scroll down, you'll see that their resolutions didn't get more than 16% or so, at Morgan Stanley, BellSouth and Verizon. However, that doesn't matter in the least. The point is that corporate CEOs react anyway. They don't want any resolutions on the corporate proxy ballot. They don't want to deal with them, don't want to have to write an explanation of why shareholders shouldn't vote for them, don't want anything at all unexpected or confusing cluttering their annual shareholder meeting, which they want to be a brief and painless ratification of their leadership.

And further, they probably didn't know that their Washington offices were even involved in this kind of funding, or why. I could imagine a conversation that goes like this: CEO calls the Washington lobbyist: "What's this crap in this shareholder proxy? Why are we giving money to these groups?" Washington lobbyist: "Well, so and so told me that Mr. DeLay would look at our issues more favorably if we made these contributions." CEO: "Well, we don't need controversy. Find some other way to deal with DeLay -- he won't be there forever." And it's my understanding that this is very much the conversation that occurred in a few instances.

This requires being savvy about using consumer power. Boycotting grapes was a fine idea, but for the growers to change their basic way of doing business (that is, to allow migrant workers to unionize) was a very big deal. That is an effort of many years. On the other hand, when an activity is marginal to a company's core business, such as its political activities, just the hint that its controversial, that it will cause hassle, that it creates one more thing to deal with, can be all the push that's needed.

I'm guessing this will happen with Sinclair, but there may be many other examples where consumer or shareholder power can be used just as effectively.

Boston Globe report on Congress

The Boston Globe has performed a great overdue service with its three-part series detailing exactly how repressive of democracy and dissent the Republican congressional majority has been. The whole series deserves reading, and provides a lot of detail, both statistical and anecdotal, to support some points that I've made here over the past few months.

The big question that the series has raised in many quarters is, How much is this just revenge (in both senses of the word "just") for the horrible way that Democrats treated Republicans before 1994?

Eight or ten years ago, I would have been sympathetic to this question. The Republican takeover was a big deal in my life -- I would have been in line for a pretty interesting job running the staff of a Senate subcommittee had the Democrats retained control, and more importantly, it was obviously a terrible setback for the issues I cared about. But I also acknowledged that the arrogance of the House Democrats, who behaved as if they controlled that institution by some sort of divine sanction, had all but brought the disaster down on their own heads. I remember a conversation a few months before that election with a top staffer for the House leadership. We were working together on a provision of the giant crime bill that year that would have guaranteed a huge new investment in after-school programs (at a time when after-school programming was almost unknown), in the name of crime prevention. We had a disagreement about a detail in the amendment, and I pointed out that if her view prevailed, we might lose the support of several Republican Senators who were the key allies. "Since when do we give a shit about Republicans?" was her response.

Sure, this attitude was partly the cause of the Republican takeover, and for a while, some Democrats could console themselves that it was their just deserts. But that's a decade ago!! Despite their promise of institutional reform, the Republicans turned themselves into the House Democrats almost immediately, and then they kept going and going and going. In several respects, beyond the statistics marshalled by the Globe, the current situation is not remotely comparable to the pre-1994 Democratic hegemony:

First, a point I've made often, the current Republicans not only repress dissent from Democrats, they also force their own partisans to march in lockstep. The fact is that with tiny exceptions, either a moderate Republican like Chris Shays or a principled conservative is as thoroughly irrelevant as Los Angeles Democrat Henry Waxman. That was never true under Democratic rule, largely because until fairly recently, there were plenty of Blue Dog Democrats and others who maintained their independence and were willing to defy a Democratic president or align with a Republican president, as they did to pass Reagan's 1981 budget and tax proposals. That's not "bipartisanship," but it was more democracy and more give-and-take than under the current regime. What makes the current majority members willing to be lapdogs remains one of the great questions in my mind.

Second, the Democrats' control of the House had no analogue in the Senate, which depended entirely on bipartisan cooperation. Any Democrat who worked in the Senate during the period of Democratic control from 1986-1994 would be familiar with the question, "Who's your Republican?" In other words, if your boss wanted to introduce a bill and have it be taken seriously, or offer an amendment on the floor, or win some quiet concession in a negotiation, the very first thing you would need to find is a Republican cosponsor or ally, preferably more than one and preferably not always Senator Chafee! (That's why retaining the Republican supporters of after-school funding in the 1994 crime bill mentioned above was so critical: we had not only Senator Danforth of Missouri, but also Senators Domenici and Stevens, who were perceived as "real" Republicans.) I can't say for sure, but I have the feeling that "Who's your Democrat?" is not the first question asked when a Republican wants to introduce a bill or amendment.

Third -- and this goes without saying -- in the Democratic era, members of Congress got comfortable, a little greedy, and cut some corners. Speaker Jim Wright wrote a self-serving memoir and sold some copies of it to lobbyists. They used the House "bank" to get advances on their pay, and a few engaged in some real embezzlement. It's all trivial, though, compared with bribing members on the House floor to change their votes, blackmailing industries that hire Democratic lobbyists, and then one by one cashing out themselves for the biggest lobbying jobs they can find. (It's amazing to me that Democratic members of Congress like Waxman, George Miller, Ed Markey and others keep at it, even though they are completely without power, even though they have to work every bit as hard as when they were in power, late nights, weekends back in the district, etc., and it is the Republicans like Billy Tauzin and Jim Greenwood who cash out as soon as they have punched the clock with whatever chairmanship puts them in the best position for the $400,000/year job with country club membership.)

This is yet another example where, if there was once perhaps a case for some moral equivalence, it has long passed.

Ready for the debate

I hope the Bush debate prep team has something better to beam him through the earpiece than what the conservative pundits are offering him. Best or worst of all is Dick Morris, who yesterday proposed three lines that are guaranteed to get Bush "back in the race." Each is stupider than the one before: If Kerry says that Saddam wasn't involved in 9/11, Bush should say that Germany wasn't involved in Pearl Harbor but we went to war against fascism anyway. And on the little matter that Hitler did declare war on the U.S., he suggests saying "does anyone doubt that Roosevelt would have gone to war against Germany anyway?" (Of course he would have, but there is the small matter that Germany had invaded all its neighbors and was bombing the hell out of our closest ally, not something Saddam was doing.) (Why am I wasting my time on this.

If Kerry says Iraq was a diversion from the war on Al-Qaeda, Morris says, "Bush should hit him between the eyes: 'Al Qeada operatives are congregating in Iraq. We can kill them there before they can spread mayhem around the world.'" In other words, the legendary "flypaper" theory which assumes that there are a fixed number of terrorists in the world and that they aren't making more.

On lack of allies, Morris suggests this response: "We have the single most important ally in the fight against terror: Pakistan." So that's why we turned a blind eye to the A.Q. Khan proliferation ring? And to the Madrassas? And to Musharraf's consolidation of power.

I assume Bush will have some better answers than these, but I can't think what they would be.

For Kerry's part, I would like to see him do two small things in the domestic part of the debate:

First, reclaim some of the idea of uniting the country rather than dividing it. That was a powerful moment in the Cheney-Edwards debate, although it was really Gwen Ifill's moment when she asked why the country seemed so much more divided. The story Kerry should tell is really the story that E.J. Dionne tells in Stand Up, Fight Back: that Bush had two huge chances to bring the country together and lead more than one fierce faction -- after the contested election and after 9/11. And both times, he willfully blew the opportunity.

Second, I'd like to see Kerry deal more creatively with the inevitable tax-and-spend liberal attacks. Here's my line: "Under your administration, government spends a lot more and does a lot less. The Medicare bill is one example. I promise that under a Kerry administration, we will spend less, pass less debt on to our grandchildren, and still do a lot more." And that has the advantage of being true.

(Why not go all the way to a direct implant in the hippocampus? We have the technology...We can make him...better than before.)

Better Days Ahead, Or At Least a 66% Likelihood

I was interviewed today by a consultant doing research on the future of campaign finance reform. She asked me to speculate about the prospects for reform legislation under two scenarios: a Kerry victory, and a Bush victory.

I started talking and soon realized that there were really three different scenarios (along with all sorts of sub-elements, such as which party controls the House and Senate, but these are the big ones):

1. A Kerry victory, with either status quo in Congress or Dems take back the Senate. In that case, on the particular issue of campaign finance reform, it's not too likely that anything much happens, unless Kerry is able to forge a governing coalition that includes McCain and some of his allies as well as Northeastern moderates, and they demand it. More generally, the big question will be whether he can move forward on health care and taxes. Nothing else will matter. It will be a slog, but progress is possible.

2. A Bush victory, and more of the same. The DeLay gang controls Congress, they push through more tax cuts, the energy bill, Social Security privatization, etc. Foreign policy continues to be a disaster. Use your imagination.

3. A Bush victory, followed by the breakdown of the unprecedented command-and-control structure of Congress, a series of indictments and trials, further exposes on Iraq, Chalabi, Plame, Medicare, Halliburton, who knows what else. Bremer's apostasy on troops and the CIA's open criticism of the White House turns out to have been the beginning of the breakdown of omerta, and before you know it, no one trusts anyone and everyone has a lawyer. Enough conscientious Republicans are bold enough to defy their leadership that a few real hearings are held, and with Bush a lame duck a few of them start positioning themselves to be the "clean house" alternative to Jeb Bush or Bill Frist, like Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings. Then, in 2006, a clean sweep of Congress, comparable to the post-Watergate "Class of '74," with fresh Democratic faces and a new energy.

In that third case, a lot of things become possible, including significant structural reform in Congress, health care, real tax reform, etc. On the other hand, it means a very ugly period between now and then.

Which of these scenarios is least likely? I think it's scenario #2. Even if Bush wins, there are too many pots about to boil over. The autocratic control of Congress, so elegantly exposed this week in the Boston Globe, is simply unsustainable in a Democratic institution. And every modern president's second term is uglier than his first: Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. (A safe choice would be to never vote to reelect a president.)

I'll still hope for #1. But #3 has some positive aspects.

The Press and the Lies

I only saw the first two-thirds or so of the Cheney-Edwards debate (after that I had to get our daughter to bed so my wife could write an actual news story about the debate), but my strongest impression was surprise at the audacity with which Cheney made assertions that just weren't true. (I've got some longer ruminations about this shamelessness in a post coming later.) The assertion that he'd never met Edwards before was the most quickly disproven (although it struck me at first as remotely plausible -- when Cheney said, "I'm up at the Senate most Tuesdays," I knew that what he meant was that he often attends the Republican policy lunch held on Tuesdays, to which Edwards is obviously not invited.)

But Cheney knows that the dynamic of the press is always to write the story, "both sides stretched the truth...," so there's no reason, once having crossed the line not to go all the way to the zone of lunacy.

Sure enough, the Washington Post came through, with a very thorough and almost instant analysis of the dubious claims in the debate. Here's the headline and the lead:

Misstatements Include Iraq, Taxes and Voting Sen. John Edwards and Vice President Cheney clashed repeatedly in their debate last night, making impressive-sounding but misleading statements on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to tax cuts to each other's records, often omitting key facts along the way.

All this would lead you to believe that the two were equally guilty of "misleading statements" and "omitting key facts."

The first examples concern Cheney's demonstrably false claim that he had never asserted links between Iraq and 9/11. Then the story turns, with the phrase, "Edwards, for his part, asserted that the war in Iraq has cost $200 billion 'and counting' -- an assertion that Cheney called him on."

But the story goes on to endorse Edwards' number: the government "has allocated -- or plans to spend -- $174 billion, and the tab should run as high as $200 billion in the next year once other expected supplemental spending is added." In other words, despite the lead-in, this is yet another X on Cheney's scorecard, not Edwards'.

And on it goes, through Cheney's false claims about the financial contributions of other countries to the Iraq effort and to his assertion that Iraqi security force casualties should be counted as part of the coalitions, which turns out not even to be factually true.

Finally, in the twelfth paragraph, an actual not-quite-accurate statement from Edwards: "Edwards asserted that 'the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary.' But Bush simply endorsed such an amendment that had already been introduced on Capitol Hill." That's all you've got? And that distinction is relevant because...? There are two other Edwards "misleading statements," equally trivial, including his statement that the Bush administration is "for outsourcing of jobs," whereas, the Post notes helpfully, administration officials have said that outsourcing is good for the U.S. economy but have not specifically endorsed the practice.

The text is a good story, and a very impressive journalistic feat. These print reporters (Glenn Kessler and Jim VandeHei, with Mike Allen, Jonathan Weisman and Walter Pincus credited as contributors) did in minutes what the blogs will need a day to do. But still: Why couldn't the headline be, "Cheney Tells Dozens of Whoppers"? Because that is the story, and the glib journalistic cliche of "both sides stretch the truth" merely obscures the actual story.