Mark Schmitt

Are Iowans Still Pacifists?

I'll say this for Peter Beinart: He's been editing a great magazine lately. But his op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday attempting to connect his call for a more explicitly hawkish Democratic party with the internal DNC debate about the primary schedule is unpersuasive and, sadly, outdated.

Beinart argues that the Iowa caucuses are "a critical part of the [Democrats'] problem" on national security, because "for starters, Iowa Democrats are dovish even by Democratic standards." Actually, that's not just "for starters," it's the entire argument. But you would not know from Beinart that the two candidates who together won almost 70% of the vote in Iowa in 2004 had both voted in favor of the Iraq war. Beinart argues that the candidates had to mimic Dean because Dean was doing well in the Iowa polls (just as he was in New Hampshire), but then, Dean didn't win Iowa. The others also worred about Dick Gephardt winning Iowa, even though Gephardt had the most pro-war position other than Lieberman and could actually be blamed for allowing Bush's war resolution to sail through Congress without an alternative, would win.

Beinart argues also that "in 2004, Joseph Lieberman and Wesley Clark, the two major candidates who placed the greatest emphasis on fighting terrorism, skipped Iowa." There are two logical flaws here. First, Iowa rewards organization above all else and Clark's late entry into the race made an Iowa contest impossible. Lieberman made the sensible judgment that he did not have a natural constituency in Iowa, but then he didn't have a natural constituency anywhere for the kind of non-Democrat Democrat he was presenting himself as in the primaries. (And which, I have argued, tragically squanders his actual stature as a responsible moderate-liberal northeastern Senator) It also requres Beinart to once again redefine Michael Moore's candidate -- General Clark -- into his "hawkish" camp, whereas Clark might just as easily be put into the dovish camp where he found much of his support. (Do a thought experiment: If Clark had been the Democratic nominee, is there any doubt that he would have been savaged by ads noting his association with Moore and that Rove would have concocted a group much like the Swift Boat veterans to denigrate Clark? And after he lost, would Beinart would be making exactly the same argument that he now makes regarding Kerry.)

I don't intend to defend the Iowa caucuses, and I'm continually surprised that candidates who have little of the organizational backing to win Iowa continue to throw themselves into their pit. The more candidates stay out of Iowa, the more irrelevant it becomes, as it has been for Republicans recently. But the argument that Iowa produces Democratic nominees too dovish to succeed has only one data point: "the caucuses proved disastrous for hawkish Washington state Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who finished last there in both 1972 and 1976." I'd leave the nostalgia for an imagined Scoop Jackson presidency to Richard Perle.

But here's the interesting question: Does Iowa still have a pacifist tradition? As Beinart acknowledges, it was very much a bipartisan tradition, and Republican Senator Grassley even voted against the first Gulf War and a previous Iowa Republican, Bourke Hickenlooper was a vicious, dimwitted anti-communist, but an isolationist who opposed even the creation of NATO. However Grassley felt no such pressure under the much more dubious circumstances of 2002, and given the significance of the Iraq war, if Iowa is such a pacifist state, how is it that Kerry lost the state, ending a string of Democratic victories in Iowa in presidential elections that goes back to, and includes, Michael Dukakis??

(I'll admit, I just enjoy writing "Bourke Hickenlooper." He has very little to do with this point.)

I asked an Iowan who is also an extremely astute political analyst about this a few weeks ago, and he agreed that the Iowa pacifist tradition was "a generational thing," of a generation now passed. He pointed to changes in religion, particularly the decline of what Beinart calls the "peace churches" such as Mennonites and the growth of more familiar evangelical churches, and also a significant change in the Catholic hierarchy in the upper Midwest from one that was extremely liberal -- liberation theology, seamless garment and all that -- to a near single-minded focus on abortion as the principal political issue. I'm sure there's much more to the explanation, but Beinart's argument belongs to the era of Scoop Jackson, not our own.

No Mandate for the AWOL

A lot of the basic rules of politics seem to have changed recently, but one that will never change is this: Politicians will always be extremely uncomfortable about being asked or forced to take political risks by others who aren't taking the same risks themselves.

There is even a wonderful phrase for this, going back to those intense first years of the Clinton administration: "getting BTU'd". Back in the early stages of the Clinton 1993 budget reconciliation bill, there was a plan to impose a tax on all energy usage based on the actual energy used, as measured in British Thermal Units (BTUs). This is not a bad policy, and would be an even better idea right now when energy conservation is far more urgent. But it was never going to be an easy sell politically, especially given that members of Congress from oil- and gas-producing states tend to gravitate toward the tax-writing committees. And it was sure to be unpopular everywhere, in exactly the same way that a gasoline-tax increase is unpopular. The Clinton administration was able to push the BTU tax through the House, but then when the bill went over to the Senate, where they needed every single Democratic vote, it became apparent that with Senators like David Boren of Oklahoma and John Breaux of Louisiana in key positions, it was totally dead. The Senate dropped the BTU tax, the White House did very little to try to force them to pass it, and the House members who had voted for it felt like they'd been hung out to dry. They had taken the risk of voting for something that was unpopular but good policy, as well as what their president wanted, but now they didn't have the good policy, the president didn't seem to care, and they had a horrible vote on their record.

They were angry at the Democratic Senators who didn't seem to feel the same obligation to support the president that they did. But they were also angry at Clinton, who didn't seem to put much pressure on the Senate or to put himself out publicly on the issue. As they saw it, he would not take the same risk that he had asked them to take. In the end, Clinton paid a big price for BTU-ing the House Democrats, perhaps including the loss of the House.

That's basically where Bush is right now on Social Security, although it's not quite the same situation. (For one thing, the BTU tax was a good policy. The only thing it has in common with Social Security privatization is that both are unpopular as hell.) Like Clinton, he is asking politicians to put themselves out on the line. Maybe they'll be able to defend their vote on Social Security, maybe not. But the reason he will ultimately fail, in a very big way, is that he himself didn't put himself on the line. Sure, he's talking about it now, he'll hold town meetings, he'll get the corporate backers of this scheme, plus the taxpayers, to fund some sort of campaign.

But when it counted, when his own political career was on the line, where was he? Nowhere. Yes, he mumbled something about private accounts occasionally in the campaign. But hardly anyone who voted for Bush thought that diverting two-thirds of the payroll tax into private accounts and paying for the transition costs with either crippling debt or reductions in future benefits was what they were voting for.

To see what I mean, imagine if Bush could call up the wavering Republicans today and say, "Look, dude, I went into your district. I campaigned for you. I told them that this was exactly what we were going to do with Social Security if they elected us. And they voted for us anyway." That would be a powerful political message. Those members would say, "Yes Mr. President," and go out there and put their necks on the line. But he can't make that call because he didn't take those risks. You might say he was AWOL.

After the election, I made the argument that Bush had no mandate because of the nature of his campaign, and others did as well. At the time, I thought we were engaged in an academic argument, or an argument about media coverage of the election, not one with immediate policy consequences. But here we are, the Congress hasn't even started, and the consequences are already apparent.

The Byrd Rule and Social Security

Ryan Lizza's New Republic Online article about Democrats and Social Security is excellent as an analysis of the parallels Democrats are drawing between the Social Security fight and the Republican effort to derail the Clinton presidency by defeating his health care proposal.

Before going on, I want to note how interesting it is that those early Clinton years -- which happen to have been my own formative experiences -- are now taken as the main template for all the lessons -- good and bad -- of presidential leadership. It was an intense period -- the budget bill, the health care proposal, the crime bill, etc. -- but this period seems to have completely supplanted other historical analogies, such as Reagan's early legislative victories or LBJ's, or the pathetic failures of the Carter presidency and Bush I, all of which have their lessons as well.

Anyway, in keeping with one of this blog's obsessions, which is the congressional reconciliation procedure, I need to comment on one of Lizza's points. He writes:

Parliamentary procedure is destiny. "History will show that what undid the Clinton health care plan is the Byrd Rule," says a senior Senate Democratic aide. The original legislative strategy for health care was to bundle the legislation with the new budget. The Democrats had a 56 to 44 majority in the Senate, similar to the GOP's current 55 to 45 majority, but the magic number for most legislation is a filibuster-breaking 60 votes. A key legislative exception is what is known as the reconciliation bill, the last stage of the annual budget process, which, under Senate rules, requires only a simple majority for passage. In 1981, Reagan used reconciliation to make major tax and spending changes. Clinton's entire strategy rested on the assumption that his plan could be passed quickly, and the reconciliation bill was the best chance to make that happen. But West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd famously killed that idea. The Byrd Rule was adopted by the Senate in 1985 to combat budget deficits. Anything not germane to the budget and, significantly for Bush's plan, anything that adds to the deficit, cannot be included in reconciliation under the Byrd Rule. Byrd warned the White House in 1993 that health care would not pass muster as part of reconciliation, and Clinton abandoned the strategy. Senate Republicans, however, have not been so timid about abusing the reconciliation process. In 2001, they used it to push through Bush's tax cuts (after replacing the Senate parliamentarian because they suspected he would rule for Democrats who argued that Bush's tax cuts violated the Byrd Rule). A huge amount of war-gaming among Senate Democrats right now concerns how to respond if Republicans try to use reconciliation to pass Bush's Social Security plan.

Here, though, is the summary of the Byrd Rule from the Congressional Research Service:

The Byrd rule defines matter to be extraneous in six cases: (1) if it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues; (2) if it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions; (3) if it is outside the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure; (4) if it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision; (5) if it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure; and (6) if it recommends changes in Social Security. (Italics added.)

You would have to fire a lot of parliamentarians before you found one who could rule with a straight face that Social Security reform could be done within budget reconciliation without violating the Byrd Rule, under both conditions 5 and 6. Without Democrats, there is no Social Security reform.

UPDATE: Welcome to all those readers referred here by Josh Marshall. Take a look around; I don't always write about obscure aspects of congressional procedure!

Just to clarify for a number of commentors: Yes, the Byrd Rule categories are defined by law in the Budget Act, the Byrd rule itself sets the terms of enforcement, and the use of points of order to knock out offending provisions, in a separate section of the law. So this is not a Senate rule that can be suspended, although the process of raising points of order under the Byrd Rule is subject to the Senate parliamentarian. In addition, the Senate can vote to waive the point of order, but usually that requires 60 votes.

There is some gray area under the Byrd Rule, notably regarding matters that have budget effects that are "merely incidental to the non-budgetary components." That  was the question over which the Republicans fired a previous parliamentarian. The other limits are less ambiguous. There's interesting speculation in the comments about how the Senate might suspend its rules, or suspend its rules in order to force through a legislative change to the Byrd rule, and then proceed to reconciliation. I don't see how any of those schemes could work -- that's way beyond the "nuclear option" being contemplated on judicial filibusters and the Republican old-timers would balk. It is because of the Byrd rule that the Bush tax cuts had to be made temporary. It is not easy to get around.

If there is a way around the Byrd Rule here, it would involve somehow redefining the private accounts as not being changes to Social Security at all. Perhaps you could do the "free lunch" approach, without touching benefits, and somehow treat the diversion of the payroll tax as not being a change to Social Security itself. You would need a cooperative parliamentarian. And then, perhaps you could get around the rule against increasing the deficit in the fiscal years beyond those covered by the reconciliation by making some sort of very long-term budget resolution. Others in the comments have suggested that they might do the whole thing "off the books," but if so, they could not have the protection of budget reconciliation, which is, after all, the process of reconciling "the books."

I'm trying to ask myself, "what's the most insane thing they could do?" and I'm not coming up with anything that would work.

Starting from Scratch

A commentor pointed me to some idiocy in George Will's column on Social Security from Sunday, where I noticed this question:

Surely the beginning of wisdom is to begin not with such speculations [about long-term solvency projections] but with the question asked in a Wall Street Journal essay by Edward C. Prescott, co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in economics: "If we could wipe the slate clean, what kind of government retirement program would we build from scratch today?"

That's a useful kind of thought experiment, although no more than that. Since we can't wipe the slate clean, even if we would today devise a very different system, the first question is how to manage change to the old system. Nonetheless, having such an alternative vision should be a guide to reform, and it's fair to expect anyone participating in this debate, either as a proponent or opponent of privatization, to have some kind of answer.

Will's/Prescott's answer is simply that you would involve equities, and the likely greater returns from equities, in a modern retirement system. Whether that's accurate or not, it is actually an incredibly narrow and cramped answer to the question.

Here's my answer: If I were designing government's role in a retirement system today, my goals would be to ensure that no working Americans dropped into poverty in old age, and that all working Americans had an opportunity to build retirement savings sufficient to ensure a generally prosperous retirement. I would also want to make sure that the system would work within a dynamic economy in which workers would have many jobs in a lifetime and in which the barriers to entrepreneurship and hiring were low. Here's what I would do:

First, create a system of universal retirement accounts for everyone, either at birth or upon entry into the workforce. Employers would be encouraged to make pension contributions into an employee's account, which would save small businesses the expense of setting up and managing their own pension systems or dealing with pension obligations long after the company has gone out of business.

Workers would be free to make their own contributions to the account, and employers would be encouraged through tax incentives to match and supplement those contributions. In addition, for low-income workers, any money they were able to contribute to the account would be matched using public funds, to create the habit of saving and investing.

Most of the money in these accounts would be invested at the workers' discretion, through a system that provided general guidelines about the appropriate level of risk (that is, stocks and small cap stocks) for a particular age or circumstance.

To ensure that no one fell into poverty as a result of poor investment decisions or inability to save, however, a base of the system would provide a kind of insurance, in which both workers and employers would be required to contribute a percentage of income, up to a limit, into a pooled fund that would be invested very conservatively (Treasury securities) and paid out as a fixed monthly benefit after retirement, possibly based on need. This would allow people to take more risks in the rest of their account, knowing that the most basic cost of living in old age was secured through this insurance system.

And yes, this basic insurance level of retirement would look a lot like Social Security. The biggest difference in my approach would be that I might add a means-test to make it even more like insurance, so that it would go only to seniors who needed it. This would enable the secure set-aside to be much lower.

None of these are totally new ideas, by the way. Variations of them have been floating around progressive policy circles for at least a decade. We've given a lot of thought to the ownership society, it's just that our politicians don't talk about it much. And you could get awfully close to it by building out that universal, portable pension system and leaving Social Security intact as the secure base of the system.

Social Security is not the totality of a retirement system. Rethinking retirement as Will suggests does not mean just tinkering with the investment profile of Social Security. Rather, Social Security is the insurance portion, the secure portion, of a complete retirement system that involves other kinds of savings and investment. And anyone who has a 401(k) or an IRA or similar knows that we can take much bigger risks with our retirement savings than we could if we did not have that secure base that is provided by Social Security.

Now I would like to hear George Bush's answer to George Will's question.

Firing the Consultants, or Changing the Incentives

Amy Sullivan does a nice job, within the constraints that most of her sources wouldn't speak on the record, of fleshing out the argument that the Democrats need to get rid of the racket of mediocre consultants who dominate most campaigns. In addition to the usual suspects Bob Shrum and pollster Mark Mellman, she fingers Democratic Senate Campaign Committee consultant Joe Hansen, who sounds like a good field organizer but whose record as a lead consultant in Senate races is now 2 and 7 in 2002 and 1 and 4 in 2004.

I'd never heard of Hansen and I didn't get a good sense from the article of Hansen's actual awfulness, if that's the word for it. It does sound like most people agree that he doesn't contribute much even though he makes the big bucks through direct mail, and candidates feel they have to hire him. On the other hand, Sullivan seems to admit that this is really just a case of a guy in over his head -- very good as the field director for a single campaign, not so useful as the lead consultant or direct mail consultant on multiple campaigns.

That suggests to me that there's more to be done than just firing. Let's change the incentives. There seem to certain roles in campaigns in which people get very, very rich: media buying is the best known, but direct mail and polling have their opportunities as well. Meanwhile, the field director can be critically important to a successful campaign, at least as important as the media consultant, but while there are some well-known superstar field directors, they're not showing off the art collections in their beautiful Georgetown home, trust me. Similarly, issue directors, opposition researchers, lead advance people, webmasters all have very specific skills a campaign can't live without, but the best of all of them are sitting around right now figuring out how to pay the rent until the next campaign cycle gets going. The mixed-up incentives that pull people away from their strengths and toward the anomalous big-money zones is part of the problem, I think. Campaigns should certainly try to cut the ridiculous percentage that goes to media buyers, as the Bush campaign did, but some of them should also take the lead in figuring out how to pay some of the other indispensables a little more and give them more sustainable careers.

The other incentive problem is the system under which candidates have to first be in effect certified by one of the campaign committees in order to be taken seriously. I mentioned this in another recent post, on money in congressional campaigns: an aspriring candidate for Congress goes to the DCCC and the first question is whether they have enough money. If they can pass that first threshold of being taken seriously, then they have to beg to be certified by the DCCC as a targetted race, which opens up the big bucks. As Sullivan meticulously shows, the only way to be taken seriously by the DCCC is to hire the right consultants.

That's a problem inherent in having one party organization, and one that is inherently risk-averse, serve as the screen for candidates. If it's not these consultants, it will be some others. That's why it is so important for candidates to be able to approach the DCCC with their own financing -- from small donors, via the internet -- and their own consultants, who know the candidate and the district, and who still have the passion. Then they can add to their team people with some more experience in the higher-stakes aspects of political campaigns, but they can do so from a position of strength, not desperation.

Another observation: Sullivan's article reminded me exactly of some things I read about the National Republican Congressional Committee in the late 1980s/early 1990s, which I remember only vaguely. At that time, apparently Joe Gaylord of the NRCC played a role similar to that which Sullivan ascribes to Joe Hansen -- no longer the director of the committee, he nonetheless used it to enrich himself and certain favored consultants by forcing candidates to use them. The Republicans had to break up that racket before taking back the House, although Gaylord later insinuated himself into Newt Gingrich's inner circle (or, should I say, future Republican presidential candidate Gingrich -- please, please let it happen!)

Finally, the only point I would differ with Sullivan on is that winning isn't the only thing. Yes, Shrum's 0-8 record establishes pretty definitively that he should not be the lead consultant on a presidential campaign (unless Jeb Bush wants him, that's fine), but beyond that, even losing campaigns produce plenty of incredible people who come out a lot more knowledgeable than they started. The last campaign I worked on was Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign, and although that's not exactly a great credential for anyone, I could identify at least a half dozen people who under the most stressful of circumstances showed that they are exactly the kind of people that anyone would want at the highest levels of any political campaign. James Carville and Paul Begala had some pretty lousy records before they mastered the game in the Lautenberg and Wofford campaigns before joining Clinton in 1992. So let's fire the smug, lazy, getting-rich losers, but not all of them.

The Wikipedia Debate

Getting away from politics for a moment (maybe), one of the most interesting debates going on at the moment is about the Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia-like reference site that anyone can edit. I've been interested in projects like Wikipedia in theory for a while -- in part because I'm interested in whether such open systems can be useful for the intellectual work of politics -- but recently have been amazed by how vastly useful it is. For example, to take a kind of narrow interest of mine, twice in the last few weeks I've needed (or wanted) to know who was chair of a particular congressional committee at a particular time in recent history. That's difficult information to find; some of the committees have histories on their own web sites, but most don't. But it's all there on Wikipedia.

But there is certainly unevenness in Wikipedia, as some topics -- especially technology -- are covered in staggering detail and others less so, so it's hard to know whether a comparable bit of info in another field would be found. On the other hand, it only takes a few seconds to find out. If you find it, is it accurate? I'm reasonably confident about such basic fact information as who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 1967. But there's a lot more to an encyclopedia than such raw facts, and there are questions about the Wikipedia's reliability when it comes to historically contested issues, such as the year of Alexander Hamilton's birth, or those subject to interpretation, which is probably most of human knowledge.

The debate is summed up in this article in Wired News, but the source of most of it is on the Many-to-Many blog, a group blog devoted to social software (and often way over my head -- what are "folksonomies," anyway?), particularly the arguments of Clay Shirky and danah boyd. I tend to lean toward Clay's position, which is basically that the Wikipedia is an amazing process and initiative, not directly comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica but with some great strengths (correcting errors, covering recent events such as the Tsunami, being free and accessible, and covering some topics more thoroughly). I love the underlying "wiki" concept, which is to make it easy to fix errors rather than making it impossible to commit the errors. In an earlier test of Wikipedia, errors were deliberately added to several articles to see how quickly they were corrected; most were fixed within hours.

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the other side of the argument, which is that a factually unreliable encyclopedia is pretty useless. (As I told my daughter a few weeks when she was waving a magic wand around a little too wildly, "A broken magic wand is just a stick.") And there are plenty of unsupported assertions, dull writing, and misplaced priorities in Wikipedia articles. But I'm not really an encyclopedia reader anyway; just the ability to use Wikipedia to check an unfamiliar name or find a weird fact instantly is amazing. As Clay Shirky says, it is more of a competitor to or supplement to Google than to the Brittanica encyclopedia.

Much of the debate has been about whether there should be some special privilege for "experts" in contributing to the Wikipedia, and whether the resistance to that option shows a cultish anti-elitism. Expertise is oddly distributed, and many people with obscure interests are as credible as experts on the issue as tenured, overcommitted academics. I'm surprised, though, that Wikipedia doesn't have any sort of system for vetting the reputation of individual contributors, in the way that Amazon reviews do, or that blogs generally do. If I could see something that said that the original entry on a topic was written by so-and-so, who is either (1) a credentialed expert in the field or (2) author of 15 other good Wikipedia entries or (3) highly rated for her corrections or something like that, it would help. And then perhaps to see the same for other contributors to/editors of the page, ranked by the magnitude of their contributions.

I'd also be interested in knowing if a Wikipedia author represents a strongly held view about a contested topic. I don't object to that, and in fact like reading something that I know might be a little opinionated if I can basically situate the opinion in relation to other views. Probably the greatest encyclopedia in history was the 1911 Britannica, with longer, signed entries by many of the leading minds of the day. Their views were idiosyncratic and I'm sure there were "errors" even relative to what was thought at the time, but at least a reader knows where those errors are coming from. On the other hand, that 1911 encyclopedia was not what we now consider an encyclopedia, just as Diderot's was not, and perhaps Wikipedia is not either.

Messengers

The brilliant Ed Kilgore of newdonkey.com has a fascinating post, ostensibly challenging the idea that what Democrats need is not so much a message but a messenger. In the end, though, I think he provides some support for the very idea he's trying to rebut.

Kilgore points out that this yearning for a messenger usually turns into a paean for Bill Clinton and, he notes accurately, "this particular variety of Clinton nostalgia is most common not among New Democrat types who view him as an important figure in the modernization of progressive politics, but among those who actually have serious misgivings about Clinton's distinctive approach to public policy." He argues that Clinton's appeal was not just in his rhetoric or his way of crafting a "narrative," but rather, "the content of his message, which was consistently unorthodox, provocative and comprehensive--all qualities lacking, in general, from the messages advanced by our last two presidential candidates, and by most Democratic candidates for Congress during recent cycles."

That's true, but I don't think content and character are so easily separated. During the summer, commenting on the Kerry campaign, I wrote that the campaign didn't seem to have a good sense that the positions it took on issues had to be not just the right positions, or the positions that polled well, but those that best showed the candidate's own strengths or told a story about the candidate's character. After all, we elect a president not just because of his position on issues we know about, but to make choices that we cannot foresee. I think the election results vindicated my argument, in that Kerry may have had positions on Iraq and terrorism, as well as health care, that were both correct and popular, but he wasn't able to structure his positions or his priorities in a way that made people feel he had the personal commitment to the fight.

Clinton, on the other hand, not only had a very substantive message, he understood exactly how to use that message to say something about the kind of person/president he was, and to change it as necessary. I think Kilgore supports that point, when he says that Clinton"was able to expand the Democratic voting base because he was willing to defy stereotypes about the party." But "defying stereotypes about the party" was a statement about the kind of person he was, not just his policies. Policies were one of several tools that he used to connect with people. The same policies, and even the same language, would not have the same resonance in a Michael Dukakis simply because Dukakis embodied the stereotypes of the party. Those stereotypes were not a particular set of policies so much as an attitude: technocratic, aloof, knows-what's-good-for-you, secular, overeducated.

Kilgore says "right now we ought to focus on what our party stands for and what we would do in power--on our message--on what we can say to persuadable voters, with or without a charismatic leader or a nifty 'narrative'--and then worry about how to add the sizzle to the steak." That's hard to disagree with, especially for those of us who might be able to help craft the message but are certainly not going to be the messenger ourselves, or recruit or finance the messenger. But a messenger does more than adopt a set of ideas already adopted by the party. Clinton certainly did. He came into national politics at a time when a lot of ideas were floating around, and uniquely, he absorbed all of them and then crafted from them a substantive message that worked for him. (And then another one, and then another one.)

And his ability to do that also brought about a flowering of ideas about public life that we had not seen in decades. I've written about this earlier: "We were reviving ideas at a mad pace. Communitarians, the 'politics of meaning' groupies, those interested in 'civil society,' the Clintonites who wanted to incubate 'bottom up' community-development strategies, and the thinkers around the Democratic Leadership Council were among many factions engaged in a deep, ongoing, and not at all destructive debate that was thoroughly rooted in history."

Since then, the fields have been mostly fallow, and liberals have fallen back to either envious emulation of the institutional structures of the right, or ideas like the Patients' Bill of Rights that are actually leftovers from the previous decade. I believe that flowering of political ideas had something to do with Clinton, and the fact that he was a sponge for them. Much as The Prince was written for Lorenzo II De Medici, many of these ideas were contrived with an audience of one in mind. Clinton would "get it," they knew. And of course, the fact that he "got it" was exactly what led to the frustration that so many of the idea-advocates had with him. He loved the ideas, he made them feel brilliant and relevant, and then he took their ideas and stirred them deep into the soup. Kilgore would have to admit that the DLC had this experience, as did liberals, but it's all water under the bridge now, which is why even the liberals who had the most "serious misgivings" about his policy directions have to appreciate how much he absorbed. (Benjamin Barber's 2001 book, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House quite candidly captures this cycle of elation, ego, and frustration.

So, no, it's not just a matter of finding a better messenger. But ideas don't exist in a vacuum, "the party" doesn't stand for anything except as individual political leaders express those things. I don't long for Clinton's bitten lip and churchgoing tone as much as for his extraordinary ability to synthesize great ideas into politically successful ones.

What does "Winning" on Social Security Mean, for Bush??

I read with great interest the leaked e-mail from White House "Office of Strategic Initiatives" director Peter Wehner (and also this profile of Wehner as the "resident thinker" of the White House -- a job that might be fun to have someday, if there is ever a more, um, congenial president, except for the part about getting to the office by 5:30 a.m.)

It's not a totally awful memo. Of course it depends on the two grand fictions they have created: the "infinite horizon" that allows them to claim "$10 trillion in unfunded liabilities" (how they stop at $10 trillion is a mystery to me -- infinity is infinity) and the idea that calculating initial benefits based on earnings history adjusted for wage growth is some kind of scam. There's some ridiculous Gingrichian pseudo-philosophical bombast, but on the whole, it's a perfectly responsible memo if you believe in its premises. It's a desperate plea to the free-lunch crowd of conservatives that if they want private accounts, they're going to have to be willing to pay for them somehow. One wishes that such a memo had gone out in advance of the first tax cut, or the second, or the third, or the Medicare bill, or the Iraq invasion...

But here's the passage that's most interesting to me:

The debate about Social Security is going to be a monumental clash of ideas -- and it's important for the conservative movement that we win both the battle of ideas and the legislation that will give those ideas life. The Democrat Party leadership, the AARP, and many others will go after Social Security reform hammer and tongs. ... But Democrats and liberals are in a precarious position; they are attempting to block reform to a system that almost every serious-minded person concedes needs it. They are in a position of arguing against modernizing a system created almost four generations ago. Increasingly the Democrat Party is the party of obstruction and opposition. It is the Party of the Past.

For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.

I think that that passage, for all its bullshit, shows that Wehner is really arguing with a faction that believes it can win "the battle of ideas" without winning the legislation. That's a very important thing to understand. Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman and others have aggressively driven home the point that the goal of the right here is to destroy Social Security. And there is no doubt that that is what the result would be if what we assume to be the White House plan became law. But while there is a faction of the right that would like to destroy Social Security, there is obviously also a considerable faction that wants only to destroy the political advantage that Democrats and liberals still get from Social Security. That's the faction that Wehner is addressing, and he's bascially arguing -- feebly, I think -- that they can't put up a merely symbolic fight, but have to actually win the legislation.

For the free-lunch faction, "winning" on Social Security is all defined in the last two sentences of the first paragraph of Wehner's memo. It involves putting the Democrats in a position where they do nothing but defend an old and boring program for most of the year. Republicans will appear to be the party of innovation, change, economic opportunity, while Democrats are the party of security, limited choices, old programs and old people. Democrats won't control the agenda, they'll just spend the year being against something, and they won't be speaking to the actual economic anxieties of younger people or working-age adults, because Social Security is a very limited response to those anxieties.

In this scenario, losing the legislation isn't the end of the world, as long as it's mostly Democrats in opposition and mostly Republicans in support. This is the scenario Newt Gingrich is promoting when he argues that "the president should go for a very large account because it's going to take exactly the same amount of energy to get a large account as a small one, and you get a dramatically bigger reward with a large account." The free lunch promised in this scenario -- very large accounts accompanied by no changes to benefits or increases in taxes -- has only one downside: it would cause an Argentine-style economic collapse. But that's only a problem if it actually passes.

As Wehner acknowledges, this takes a very delicate dance. You can't pull it off unless you at least seem to be serious about winning "both the battle of ideas and the legislation." If the legislation can't get past the first sniff test -- and so far, thanks to the blogs, even Bush's facile sound bites aren't making it -- then you can't get to the "momentous clash of ideas" that they are looking for. Wehner ends his e-mail by invoking Senator Moynihan's words from the report of the 2001 Social Security Commission -- not a wisely chosen example, I think, since that commission did such a half-assed job that it could not even get to the starting gate for the "clash of ideas."

If you understand that at least one faction of the right -- and perhaps all of it -- is a hell of a lot more interested in playing a game that keeps Democrats on the defensive all year than in actually changing Social Security, then I think you can understand why some Democrats are still wary of this whole debate. That's why I'm not as distressed about the "fainthearted faction" as Marshall is. Those Democrats who want to find a place to stand other than total opposition to changing Social Security know that there are two games being played here, and they want to win both. Stopping the legislation will be the easy part. It's only a little premature to say that that's already been won. (When the White House is forced to turn things over to a "bipartisan group of Senators" to come up with something to salvage the plan, that's usually the desperate end game, as it was for the Clinton health plan in 1994 but at least it took a respectable six months to get there.) But the battle of ideas requires a little more creativity. There's a lot out there, from the Aspire Act to the Rahm Emanuel plan. I think the next step is for Democrats to get behind one of these things, grab the mantle of the "opportunity society," and push toward the day when the White House has to respond to their agenda. It's not as far off as it seems.

It's Money After All

I've spent a lot of time in the last seven or eight years on the issue of campaign finance reform. I've written a lot about it, and as a funder, I've helped to build some of the organizations working on reform. But I have a love-hate relationship with the issue -- maybe more hate. It's limited as an explanation of what's wrong with American democracy. It's hard to engage the public around such an intangible, process-oriented issue, and even harder to do it in a way that doesn't deepen their cynicism about government. And even the tiniest steps toward reform, such as the McCain-Feingold limits on soft money, are excruciating, and lead inevitably to disappointment since they change so little. Finally, I'm sympathetic to both the futility argument (private money will always find a way into the system) and the free speech arguments, which is why I'm always focused on reforms that expand the ability of candidates to communicate rather than just restrict money.

And yet, a few months ago, a colleague asked me for advice on a recommendation to a foundation that wanted to find a single main project to respond to the problems of American democracy. Everything could be on the table: election-day voter registration, vote-by-mail, redistricting reform, fusion, anything. Even with everything on the table, I still couldn't come up with a better single solution than generous public financing for candidates. The full public financing models in Arizona and Maine, or the 4:1 matching system of New York City still offer the best hope for vigorous, competitive elections in which all voices can be heard. That's not to the exclusion of other reforms that may help, but on balance, I've concluded it would have the greatest impact.

I was reminded of this by the paper I read today, thanks to Ruy Teixera's Emerging Democratic Majority blog, by Alan Abramowitz and his colleagues at Emory, Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections They attempt to assess the leading arguments for the declining competitiveness of House elections -- the inherent power of incumbency, increasing partisan and cultural polarization (Red and Blue America), and redistricting, and reject all three. More important, they argue, are "sorting," in which Republican/conservative districts are less likely to have anomalous Democratic representatives and vice versa, and the financial disadvantage of challengers. The average amount spent by challengers in moderately competitive races, they find, was $699,000, and only 13% of challengers spent that much.

After the 2000 elections, I found that only one new member of Congress from a competitive district -- that included both successful challengers and open-seat candidates -- had spent less than $1 million.

Several years ago, I heard Senator Mitch McConnell, the arch-foe of all campaign finance reform, argue that parties needed to have the special advantage of soft money because only parties will support challengers. Yet the sad fact is that parties are the most risk-averse. Any candidate who approaches the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with a plan to challenge a not-obviously-vulnerable Republican will get one question: "How much can you raise?' Not, "What can we do to help?" If a candidate isn't independently wealthy or well-connected enough to raise a million, the party puts the race in the second tier. And thus when a seat suddenly moves into play, as when Rep. Jim Greenwood suddenly retired to become a lobbyist last year, the party has done nothing to put its candidate in a stronger position.

Public financing for congressional campaigns is obviously going to be a tough sell, but perhaps as more politicians come to national office with positive impressions of the New York, Arizona, or Maine systems, it will become more plausible. In the meantime, the hundreds of thousands of small donors energized in the last year should begin to think about how to bankroll those promising, marginal congressional challengers, if only to get them to the point where they can get the DCCC's risk-averse attention.

I do have one caveat to the Abramowitz et al paper: I don't find his rejection of the theory that redistricting is a principle cause of the decline of competition to be convincing. The authors theorize that if redistricting reinforces incumbent advantage, one should expect to see a greater decline in competition in the cycle immediately after redistricting, that is, 1982, 1992, or 2002. Since those election cycles tend to be more competitive than cycles in the middle/end of the decades, they conclude that redistrticting is not the major factor in incumbent advantage or partisanship. But redistricting is always going to be a disruptive event. Even if redistricting is done in a way to protect both current incumbents and the party in power, the election immediately after a redistricting is likely to bring some change. There may be new districts, incumbents may be pit against each other, and even safe incumbents may be running in partially unfamiliar territory. In fact, one often sees redistricting plans in which a safe incumbent who gets 75% of the vote actually encourages adding unfriendly territory that might reduce his share of the vote to 58%, but takes it out of another district in order to protect another incumbent of the same party. (In fact, I once heard Rep. Jerry Nadler explain that he had done exactly that, volunteering to add more conservative and very distant Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Gravesend and Bensonhurst to his mostly Upper West Side Manhattan district, creating a bizarre district of two parts separated not just by New York Harbor but also by several miles of land.) Such seats might appear slightly vulnerable in the first election after the redistricting, but then quickly settle down as the incumbent lays claim to them.

So, let's not take redistricting off the table as a factor. But the rest of the Abramowitz paper is very powerful. And it does give Democrats some cause for optimism, in that there are a dozen or more districts in which Republicans represent districts in which they are as out of step as Democrats were in Southern districts a dozen years ago. If the money is there for good challengers, those seats can perhaps be competitive. And in the long run, if we can reduce the financial barrier through good public financing, we can expect more competition in all these races.

The Will to Believe

You would think that by this point, Andrew Sullivan would have learned his lesson: the Czar is behind it all. There's no "good conservative" Bush being supressed by evil subordinates. In this case, Sullivan argues that Bush should forget Social Security private accounts, at least for now, and put the priority on "real tax reform," which for Sullivan means "eliminating corporate loopholes" and "rewarding ordinary workers."

Sullivan draws an interesting parallel to the choice early in the Clinton administration about whether to put the priority on health care reform, which appealed to liberals, or welfare reform, which Clinton had promised to the New Democrats. The choice to lead with health care reform, he argues, cost Clinton the Congress in 1994 and much of the opportunity to do both. That remains a fascinating historical question, and I think Sullivan is probably right. (Although I didn't think so at the time, agreeing with Senator Moynihan that "we have a health care crisis; we don't have a welfare crisis," and that only secure health care would make it possible for familiies to leave welfare. UPDATE: Actually, I remembered that incorrectly -- Moynihan, like Sullivan, derided Clinton's health plan and said on Meet the Press that there was no health care crisis but there was a welfare crisis. At other points, however, he and others argued that improving health coverage for working poor families was a prerequisite for welfare reform, which was absolutely correct. Moynihan was gloriously, infuriatingly inconsistent.)

But the parallel to the situation now, in which he portrays Social Security reform as similar to health care (a sop to the party's ideological base) and tax reform as more broadly appealing across party lines, doesn't work for one simple reason: There's no reason to think that Bush's tax reform, if and when they get serious about it, will have anything to do with rewarding ordinary workers or eliminating loopholes or simplifying anything. They've had three chances to tinker with the tax code, and three times they've made it more complicated and more regressive. All the trial balloons they've floated so far, such as eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes or for employer-paid health insurance, would hurt ordinary workers, and further shift the burden of taxation onto labor income.

I agree with every bit of Sullivan's rationale for "real tax reform," and I agree that it is a "true conservative" policy. But how can he still even imagine that such a reform would come from this White House?