Mark Schmitt

Breach of Contract?

It seems beyond doubt that the basic partisan dynamic in the country right now is that voters are "finished with" the radical right (to borrow the memorable phrase from the most recent Democracy Corps strategy memo) but that the Republican collapse isn't matched, yet, by
an affirmative move toward the Democratic Party. Democrats aren't yet offering anything that captures the imagination of voters.

It's in that context that I've been trying to figure out what the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is doing this week by pitching a campaign around the idea that the Republicans "breached" the 1994 "Contract With America."

For years, Democrats have been in envious awe of the Contract, the clarity of its message, and its ability to cut through generic mistrust of politicians to establish a positive connection with voters. When Dems have attempted to produce our own version of the Contract -- a short list of clear, meaningful principles -- it has too often descended into the 61-point interest group agenda of last year's "New
Partnership for America's Future." So after almost a dozen years of trying to replicate the Contract, Democrats seem to have decided to embrace it.

This seems to me monumentally stupid for a half dozen reasons:

* Eleven years is a long time. Yes, to Washington Dems the Contract with America is still a living, breathing monster. Many of us lost our jobs because of it. (I didn't, but I would have been in line for a very cool job if Democrats had retained the Senate.) But does the Contract have any meaning for ordinary people after 11 years, three presidential elections, an impeachment, Sept. 11, a war, etc.? I'm open to hearing about poll numbers that indicate otherwise, but I suspect the answer is no.

* This seems almost too banal to point out, but if you're going to excoriate someone for breaking a contract, it would help if you support the contract in the first place. The Contract was a weird mix of procedural reforms that should never have been controversial (ban proxy voting in House committees, require commitee meetings to be public) and very substantive changes (supermajority requirement for tax increases, balanced budget, no U.S. troops under U.N. Command, etc.) Many of the substantive changes have passed into law long ago (welfare reform, child tax credit, capital gains tax cut). Is the DCCC saying that Democrats endorse the remaining provisions of the Contract?

(I realize this second point contradicts the first a little bit -- if no one remembers the Contract, you can just redefine as a promise to not be corrupt. But that's a little too clever.)

* It's obvious that the fad of George Lakoff and "framing" has finally come to an end in official Democratic circles. I'm a Lakoff critic, but it's too bad that the occasional good insights from that fad seem to have been forgotten in the predictable backlash. One is the idea that certain language will tend to "activate" the other side's frame. In this case, attacking the Republicans for breach of the "Contract with America" does little more than activate the positive frame of the Contract and its attitude of just-do-it, automatic accountability, and corrupt Democrats!

* The God-that-failed narrative, which holds that after ten years, the hopeful honesty of the Republican revolution somehow became corrupted by immersion in the swamp of Washington, has already been claimed by the right. Almost a year ago, Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard was explaining away the Abramoff scandals: After ten years, he said, it was Washington that changed the Republicans rather than the other way around, and "stripped of its peculiar grossness, Abramoff's really is just another story of business as usual in the world of Washington lobbying." (I love that phrase, since "its peculiar grossness" -- gangland slayings, for example -- is kind of the whole thing.)

And of course, this is all spin. The Republicans didn't slowly become corrupted by Washington, they brought in a level of corruption not seen since the Gilded Age. Newt Gingrich was a serial willful violator of ethics and campaign finance rules, DeLay launched the "K Street Project" in 1995. After the far-right Republicans consolidated their total control in 2001 and then when they took back the Senate in 2002, the numbers got bigger and the corruption more professionalized, but it was theirs from the start.

So are Democrats endorsing the idea that the Contract was a bright hope that faded? Are they the ones to restore the revolutionary hope? Just what are they saying?

* The whole breach-of-contract argument is internal and process-oriented. It's an insiders' argument to insiders. What does it have to do with war, economic security, global challenges, hurricanes and floods, etc. Yes, reform is a key theme and Democrats must embrace it, but not in a bloodless good-government way. It's got to be integrally connected to the things people care about in life, and in the non-political aspects of their life.

If Democrats expect to capitalize on the emerging scandals, indictments, chaos, and the President's unpopularity to nationalize a congressional election for the first time since 1994, they have to find one or two clear points, substantive points, that are our own and that would matter: universal health care, preparedness for future crises, economic security, bring the war in Iraq to an end -- something serious that people can grab onto. Talking about someone else's 11-year-old Contract is no substitute.

Pump and Dump Politics

Perhaps everyone's been writing about this (I was away for the weekend, hanging out with the environmentalists) but in all the discussion of Bill Frist's sale of HCA stock, supposedly but not actually in a blind trust, I don't think I've seen much attention to the reason that the insiders, including Frist, knew that HCA was a sinking ship. According to Thompson Financial analyst Mark LoPresti, quoted in several of the stories, the key piece of inside information that Frist and the other insiders had that others didn't was this:

Uninsured patient admissions were rising faster than those of insured patients

Let's consider why it might generally be considered a conflict of interest for Frist to own so much HCA stock. The main concern would be that Frist might be in a position to use his public power to improve the financial condition of such hospitals; for example, he could push for some kind of increased coverage for the uninsured or even universal health care. He might have a public motive for doing so, but he might also have a private motive, since it would hugely benefit a hospital chain like HCA. That's the reason for putting all his stock in a blind trust, so that he won't know, and we know that he won't know, whether he would benefit privately.

But when the uninsured ratio goes up, and Frist actually knows that this will affect his own portfolio, paradoxically his reaction isn't what the normal conflict-of-interest analysis would assume. Rather than use his official power to reduce the number of uninsured, he takes a private action, and just dumps the stock. And not just any stock, this is his patrimony he's selling out. It's the stock of his own family's company. But he washes his hands of it. Leaves it to some bigger sucker.

And that, to me, is telling, and it's about more than Frist's despicable character. Because it goes to the great paradox of what is currently called "conservatism." The central constituency of the modern Republican machine is, broadly speaking, business. Yet there are dozens of policies, passive as well as active, large and small, that are going to be a disaster for American business in the medium- and long-term. Some are disasters for specific companies and sectors, others for business generally: the fiscal debacle, the burden and unpredictability of health care costs, climate change, income inequality, short-sighted energy policies designed only to boost supply, chaos in the Middle East, hostility to the U.S. everywhere, lack of access to higher ed, collapsing infrastructure, etc. Somehow, in a way that would not have been the case in previous decades, business leaders and many investors seem bizarrely unconcerned about these trends.

And why is that? I suspect it's integrally related to the "pump and dump" culture that has infiltrated business, a mutation of the cult of "shareholder value." (Pump and dump refers to the practice of talking up a stock or making earnings appear high, then selling just before the inherent weaknesses in the company become apparent. On the Yahoo! Finance message board discussing HCA, Frist is referred to lovingly as the "Pump and Dump Drama Queen.") Investors as well as executives don't look at a company as something to build for the long term; they need to beat their numbers in the current quarter. And for the most part they assume that by the time things get tough, they'll be out. The insiders will bail out before the suckers; the CEO will move on to some other company. Or, if worst comes to worst, he'll retire with a nice package guaranteeing health care, use of the company plane for life, and a nice package of stock to sell when someone else turns the company around.

(I'm sure there are many books that can help explain this culture; I don't read very much about business but I found Roger Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash readable and enlightening. Bernie Ebbers and Dennis Kozlowski are not uniquely bad actors, they're just the ones who took it the furthest over the line of the law.)

And what is our political culture except another version of pump and dump? Everything from war to tax policy to energy policy to the Medicare bill is a short-term effort to boost the president's political stock, with the long-term costs left to some bigger sucker.

I don't consider myself anti-business or anti-corporate. But there's much that's sick about much of American business now, even after the crash, a short-term, short-sighted culture of irresponsibility, exemplified by insiders dumping the stock of their own company and their own family just ahead of bad news. And if that's the culture of business that most strongly influences our politics, then we do need an anti-business politics. But I wish we could find a way to infuse both business and politics with more of a culture of long-term responsibility and honesty.

Latino diversity -- a Question

In a generally convincing article arguing that New York Democrats should be less sanguine about the prospect of Michael Bloomberg's reelection as mayor -- which could mean 16 straight years of Republican mayors -- Greg Sargent makes an intriguing point:

If the Dems continue to desert Ferrer, it will help Rove achieve another key strategic goal: winning Latinos to the GOP, a minority-outreach effort that he actually takes seriously. A victory for Ferrer, New York?s first Hispanic nominee -- coming right after Antonio Villaraigosa?s election as the mayor of Los Angeles -- would mean that Latinos had won city halls in major cities on both coasts. That would be deeply meaningful for Hispanics nationwide, reaffirming Democrats as the party truly interested in elevating them and making it tougher for them to bolt. National Dems seem blind to the potent symbolism that such a bicoastal victory would carry. But you can bet Rove isn?t blind to it.

That's a creative defense of the dreary Ferrer: He's no Villaraigosa, but together he and Villaraigosa average out to an inspiring bicoastal pair.

But I'm interested in another question, and I wonder if anyone reading this is enough of an expert on Latino politics to offer an informed answer -- is this true? Is it the case that Mexican-Americans in Texas would be inspired by the election of Hispanic mayors in New York and LA? Or El Salvadorans in Northern Virginia, or Latinos in Chicago? Or old-line Hispanic families in New Mexico?

I might be a little naive about this, since I was probably 20 years old before I really understood that there Hispanics who weren't Puerto Rican. But I now know that even within New York City, the worlds and the experiences of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are very different, and it's hard for me to imagine that Latino communities in other places and with roots in other places have much more of a common identification.

And if there is anything more than talk to Rove's Latino strategy, I suspect it involves a very careful segmenation of the Hispanic population. He's not going after Hispanic votes in New York City or LA, where the population is large and already holds political power through the Democratic Party. Getting 20% more of those votes wouldn't matter for either congressional or presidential politics. But what about the growing number of Hispanics in states that don't already have established Latino political institutions, where the population is more dispersed and more suburban or rural? North Carolina and Virginia come to mind, perhaps also Colorado, and states in the upper Midwest as well. I suspect the Republicans know a lot more about those voters and where the pockets are of people who are more religious, more conservative, more likely to start voting like white ethnics.

It is now generally understood that the Democratic Party made a hash of its outreach to Hispanic voters in 2004, with Simon Rosenberg's New Democrat Network the best effort to try to salvage something. But I worry that Democrats often look at "Hispanics" as if they are as cohesive and unified a group of voters as African-Americans. I suspect that's not true, but I don't know. Anyone have a better answer?

Latino diversity -- a Question

In a generally convincing article arguing that New York Democrats should be less sanguine about the prospect of Michael Bloomberg's reelection as mayor -- which could mean 16 straight years of Republican mayors -- Greg Sargent makes an intriguing point:

If the Dems continue to desert Ferrer, it will help Rove achieve another key strategic goal: winning Latinos to the GOP, a minority-outreach effort that he actually takes seriously. A victory for Ferrer, New York?s first Hispanic nominee -- coming right after Antonio Villaraigosa?s election as the mayor of Los Angeles -- would mean that Latinos had won city halls in major cities on both coasts. That would be deeply meaningful for Hispanics nationwide, reaffirming Democrats as the party truly interested in elevating them and making it tougher for them to bolt. National Dems seem blind to the potent symbolism that such a bicoastal victory would carry. But you can bet Rove isn?t blind to it.

That's a creative defense of the dreary Ferrer: He's no Villaraigosa, but together he and Villaraigosa average out to an inspiring bicoastal pair.

But I'm interested in another question, and I wonder if anyone reading this is enough of an expert on Latino politics to offer an informed answer -- is this true? Is it the case that Mexican-Americans in Texas would be inspired by the election of Hispanic mayors in New York and LA? Or El Salvadorans in Northern Virginia, or Latinos in Chicago? Or old-line Hispanic families in New Mexico?

I might be a little naive about this, since I was probably 20 years old before I really understood that there Hispanics who weren't Puerto Rican. But I now know that even within New York City, the worlds and the experiences of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are very different, and it's hard for me to imagine that Latino communities in other places and with roots in other places have much more of a common identification.

And if there is anything more than talk to Rove's Latino strategy, I suspect it involves a very careful segmenation of the Hispanic population. He's not going after Hispanic votes in New York City or LA, where the population is large and already holds political power through the Democratic Party. Getting 20% more of those votes wouldn't matter for either congressional or presidential politics. But what about the growing number of Hispanics in states that don't already have established Latino political institutions, where the population is more dispersed and more suburban or rural? North Carolina and Virginia come to mind, perhaps also Colorado, and states in the upper Midwest as well. I suspect the Republicans know a lot more about those voters and where the pockets are of people who are more religious, more conservative, more likely to start voting like white ethnics.

It is now generally understood that the Democratic Party made a hash of its outreach to Hispanic voters in 2004, with Simon Rosenberg's New Democrat Network the best effort to try to salvage something. But I worry that Democrats often look at "Hispanics" as if they are as cohesive and unified a group of voters as African-Americans. I suspect that's not true, but I don't know. Anyone have a better answer?

The Official Break

"Santorum takes Bush to task over Social Security strategy," reads today's headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Looking back on the last year, Santorum, R-Pa., said he had struggled to understand President Bush's decision to come out "right after the campaign" -- without allowing the 2004 presidential election fervor to cool -- "with this mandate that you're going to change the sacred cow of the [political] left, who've just been energized beyond belief.

"You've just defeated your opponent, and, you know, you take a 3-iron to the beehive," Santorum said. "You go out there and whack the beehive, and you wonder why all these bees are buzzing around your head. And not only do you whack the beehive, but then you don't do anything [more] for two months."

Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference as well as head of a Senate subcommittee on Social Security, said that as soon as White House officials told him that they were going to roll out Social Security reform initiatives in 2004, he urged them to construct a plan on the order of a presidential campaign, believing that "it was bigger than anything we've tried to do."

Santorum can't back down on the substance of privatization, so the only way he can separate himself from Bush on this is by going after the strategy.

But what's really interesting is not just that Santorum said all this -- after all, he has a history of saying things in conversations with reporters that might not be, um, official policy -- but where it came from. The story was e-mailed out widely to reporters at 9:08 this morning by the Senate Republican Conference itself.

This might be the official declaration of the end, not just of Social Security but of deference to Bush. And members of Congress, especially those like Santorum who are worried about reelection, have so many years of docility to make up for that if they really want to separate themselves from a highly unpopular president, they will have to make a very fast, very decisive break.

A Million Here, A Million There

In a great example of what the distributed, decentralized processing power of the internet is good for, a number of bloggers have teamed up to take President Bush at his word and demonstrate that the costs of Gulf Coast reconstruction can be paid for by cutting "pork" from the federal budget. "Porkbusters," created by Glenn Reynolds and N.Z. Bear of Truth Laid Bear, is an admirable effort, much along the lines of Josh's efforts on the DeLay Rule, Social Security, and now the Gulf Coast Wage Cut. In addition to contributing annotated examples of wasteful federal spending, participants are encouraged to "call your Senators and Representative and ask them if they're willing to support having [a local] program cut or -- failing that -- what else they're willing to cut in order to fund Katrina relief...Post the results."

After just a few days, the project has identified over $14 billion in spending that could be cut, a small downpayment on the $200 billion reconstruction project. And a lot of it is true waste, mostly the earmarked projects in HUD and Transportation spending that were under control in the late 1990s but have exploded recently. (Who knew there were so many bike trails being built?)

But cut all these million-dollar boondoggles and you would still never have anything close to the cost of reconstruction. I did a quick skim of the list, and there are only three items that amount to more than bike trails. One is the seismic upgrade of the Golden Gate bridge, a billion-dollar undertaking which its would-be cutter says could be paid for by raising tolls. One participant proposes to eliminate all domestic violence programs (and runs an anti-feminist blog apparently dedicated to the repeal of the Violence Against Women Act) -- that would save $3.1 billion over five years. Another wants to cut a light rail project in Charlotte, NC, but the $2.8 billion ascribed to that project includes state as well as federal costs. Federal funding for that was only $30 million last year. So just by looking closely at the two biggest suggestions, that $14 billion becomes $8 billion.

But this project should continue, because it will provide provide participants with an education in the actual insignificance of domestic discretionary spending, of which "pork" is a small part, in the bigger context of war, reconstruction, and tax cuts. Eventually participants will grasp the truth of what budget expert Stan Collender writes this week in his National Journal column:

President Bush either is wrong, mistaken, or misleading: The significant additional federal spending because of Hurricane Katrina absolutely will not be offset with cuts to other programs.

There are two reasons. First, there isn?t enough ?unnecessary? spending or waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget to pay for the federal costs of Katrina, which are now expected to total at least $200 billion in fiscal 2006 alone. That may be hard to believe in a budget that will approach $2.6 trillion next year. But when you subtract those things the White House will not want to cut -- Social Security, interest on the debt, most other federal mandatory spending, the Pentagon, the costs of activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security and foreign aid -- there is only about $500 billion left to be scrutinized. Completely offsetting Katrina-related costs would mean that all other programs would have to be cut by about 40 percent, a ridiculous notion under virtually any circumstances.

[Domestic discretionary spending] has been the part of the budget where the Bush administration has focused most of its attention since 2001 and undoubtedly is where, in a perfect world, it would like to make more changes. But cuts like this would have a disastrous impact on the day-to-day activities of virtually every domestic federal department and agency; some would have to cease operations completely.

A report from the Center on Budget and Policy priorities adds some context. The Center points out that, even if Katrina reconstruction costs $200 billion over five years, federal spending over that period will average 20.1% of gross domestic product, lower than in any year from 1975 to 1996.

It is revenues, however, that are completely out of line with historic norms. At 17.2% of GDP, tax receipts over the next five years will be much lower than in any year from 1977 through 2002.

The gap is the deficit. Anyone who wants to reduce the deficit should start by looking at what's unusual, what's changed that turned the surplus into a deficit. That's probably the place to start. And it's not spending.

That leaves the question, do we need to offset the spending for Gulf Coast reconstruction? In theory, of course not. That's exactly the kind of project that one runs deficits for -- a crisis, a major capital investment, an undertaking that will yield economic benefits into the future. But it is exactly the reason that one doesn't want to run massive deficits routinely in good economic times. It makes it all the more painful when you do have an emergency or a recession. It is the deficit that pre-existed Katrina -- projected at $4.5 trillion over the period 2006-2015 -- that we need to be concerned about and that will take a toll on our economy.

There's lot of other good stuff at the Center on Budget site today, including a paper showing that just the two tax cuts that are scheduled to go into effect in January, and that benefit almost exclusively the very wealthy (97% of benefits go to households with incomes over $200,000), would cost $146 billion over ten years. How about that as a place to start paying for reconstruction? Also, a good breakdown of the demographics of people affected by Katrina, by poverty, race, lack of vehicle, etc.

Anti-Government Government

(cross-posted at tpmcafe.com)

The Bush initiative for rebuilding the Gulf Coast amounts, as others have said, to an experiment in massive government spending to test essentially anti-government ideas, particularly the idea of creating tax- and regulation-free zones to attract commerce.

As Harold Meyerson points out, this anti-government government is a revival of Jack Kemp-ism, the platform of market-based, ownership initiatives as a poverty strategy that Kemp championed when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush 41 administration. As Meyerson points out, these strategies, especially Enterprise Zones or Empowerment Zones, proved to be of very limited value. Tax incentives alone have very little effect on where employers choose to locate jobs. Investing in education is demonstrably more likely to make employers want to place a plant or an office in an impoverished urban or rural community.

But there's one little correction to Meyerson's piece: Jack Kemp talked about Enterprise Zones, but he never implemented them in any significant way. Bill Clinton did. And, after some false starts, he did it in a way that was much more effective than tax credits alone, adding $1 billion in direct funding for communities that developed comprehensive plans for their futures. It was a mixed experiment, to say the least, but it was undertaken and implemented with seriousness and passion by Kemp's successor at HUD, Henry Cisneros, and had some notable successes.

I point this out not just to correct the record, but because it's an important point: The Right doesn't really carry out innovative social policies, they mostly just talk about them. And they use them entirely as a tool of opposition, for no purpose other than to say, "Liberals want to throw money at failed old programs, but we've got a new approach..." It's false on two levels. Liberals/Democrats are absolutely interested in new and market-based approaches, if they work. And conservatives aren't really interested in those approaches, they just like having an excuse to do nothing.

I pointed this out in a review a few weeks ago of Rick Santorum's book, It Takes a Family. Throughout his discussion of poverty policy, Santorum begins paragraphs like this:
?The Village Elders [his term for liberals] consider a large percentage of our population to be helpless: they're not going to consider how to empower the poor to build wealth,? or ?The village elders like to show they care for the poor among us simply by spending more money,? rather than investing strategically to build communities. But then Santorum offers his solution, always a piece of legislation that he cosponsored with a liberal like Senator Jon Corzine.

A friend suggested at lunch today that the Republicans wouldn't be able to succeed with the Gulf Coast rebuilding initiative because they are so hostile to government that they can't carry out a big-government project. By analogy, he suggested that if Democrats had to carry out a significant downsizing of government, we wouldn't do it well. Each has its strength. And that's certainly the public perception.

Except that it was only under the last Democratic administration that the government was significantly downsized, growth in federal spending slowed and the number of federal employees significantly reduced. Initiatives like Vice President Gore's Reinventing Government took the project of making government more efficient very seriously and made it work. Republicans can't make big government work and they can't make small government work either, because they're too glib and uninterested in the whole undertaking. All they can do is cut taxes and leave the hard work for someone else.

Bottom line: Whether you want innovative, market-based programs to end poverty (and I do, balanced with other programs), whether you want smaller more efficient government, or whether you want a big, WPA-style undertaking, you have to put it in the hands of people who understand government, who care about making it work, who don't view it as the enemy.

Accountabilty Moment

Garance Franke-Ruta asks an important question:

WHAT DOES ACCOUNTABILITY LOOK LIKE? I was intrigued by a question raised in Paul Krugman?s column Friday. Krugman wrote:

Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time.

Can the administration escape accountability again? Some of the tactics it has used to obscure its failure in Iraq won't be available this time. The reality of the catastrophe was right there on our TV's, although FEMA is now trying to prevent the media from showing pictures of the dead. And people who ask hard questions can't be accused of undermining the troops.

But the other factors that allowed the administration to evade responsibility for the mess in Iraq are still in place. The media will be tempted to revert to he-said-she-said stories rather than damning factual accounts. The effort to shift blame to state and local officials is under way. Smear campaigns against critics will start soon, if they haven't already. And raw political power will be used to block any independent investigation.

Will this be enough to let the administration get away with another failure? Let's hope not: if the administration isn't held accountable for what just happened, it will keep repeating its mistakes.

I hear so many people saying the same basic thing as Krugman -- Bush must be held accountable -- that I thought maybe it would be good to get a discussion going and unpack this. Because it's not at all clear to me what holding him accountable would mean (or look like), given that he's term-limited and his party controls Congress.

What one thing has to occur in order for it to be clear that Bush has been held accountable by voters or the opposition party?

Here's my response:

First, I'm tired of the overused word "accountability." As specific and tough as the word sounds, it has become a vague and loose term, one of the great weasel words of modern discourse. Consider, for example, that every politician who talks about education invokes the phrase "teacher accountability," which can mean almost anything.

Back to the administration, or the administration+congressional leadership: I think their attitude, and tactically it's a brilliant insight, is that only a few things count: winning presidential elections, keeping absolute control of Congress -- which means not just a Republican majority but a malleable one -- and winning on the few things that matter to their cash constituents -- tax cuts, tort reform, tax cuts, energy bill subsidies, tax cuts, bankruptcy changes, and eliminating Social Security. The war was also important, for a lot of reasons, but not least because it established the president's authority to act without any check, domestic or external and gave Bush the advantages of a "wartime president." Everything else is means to those ends. The president's popularity dipped into the low 40s, and they passed the energy bill anyway -- what more proof do you need that the president's poll numbers hardly matter, if you control the instutions? Before Katrina, they were on the verge of permanent repeal of the estate tax plus another tax cut in reconciliation, even with Bush's numbers in the toilet!

That's why I didn't fully accept Garance's argument last week that they aren't really PR geniuses because of the poll numbers -- they don't need the poll numbers until they need the poll numbers, and when they need them, they figure they can find a way to push them up a bit and/or push the relevant Democrats down. (Or, another way to put it, is that they may not be PR geniuses, but they actually know that the exercise of power does not depend entirely on PR.)

I think of Rove as looking at past presidencies and seeing them as weakened because they worried too much about consequences that didn't really matter, such as the judgment of history or short-term popularity. Bush 41 thought that he had to do something about the deficit, or there would be consequences. So he got drawn into the Andrews Air Force Base budget summit, which earned him a fight within his own party. But Rove recognizes that there's a lot you can get away with if you just act like you can get away with it, especially if you raise the stakes, and as a result he moves with much greater freedom. It seems to me that part of their genius is they've gotten rid of much of the "you just can't do that" mentality of politics, and stripped everything down to the bare essence of what they can get away with.

One of my biggest worries is that that's a genie that will be very hard to put back in the bottle. Politics, like much of civilization, depends on the existence of some unquestioned, "it just isn't done" customs. An example that I've mentioned a couple times is the explicity theory, proven once again in the CAFTA vote, that you want to pass a bill with as narrow a margin as possible, because every vote over 218 in the House is wasted and might represent a compromise. That's not something that legislative strategists ever thought before -- they wanted to go into votes with the most comfortable margin, and to win with enough to have a clear endorsement against future challenges. And I'm convinced that Bush/Rove brought that same mindset to the presidential campaign. Most incumbents would want to have a nice Reagan-in-1984-type landslide in order to feel a clear mandate. But Rove/Bush thought that of every vote above 51% as a wasted concession; they knew that all Bush had to do was win, and he could declare the mandate.

So "accountability" means understanding one of the two or three things that they do care about, and beating them on those things. We must start beating tax cuts, ideally with Republican votes. Win back the House or Senate this fall, if only so that Democrats have subpoena power somewhere, something they can't tolerate. But if it's not one of the things that they care about -- if it's just one of their means, not their ends -- then while it may give us some satisfaction, it doesn't fundamentally break down their racket. (Bad poll #s, indictment on Plame, exposure of Medicare scam, etc.)

Judgment of history doesn't really matter to them and shouldn't really matter to us (how is it possible to doubt what that judgment will be?) but there is so much that we will have to undo once this era ends that it will be politically useful for anything associated with the W years to be automatically suspect and unpopular. I want to get to the point where, when the Republicans attack us for repealing some horrible tax cut, we can just say, "You people want to take us back to the George W. Bush era!" and they just slither away.

You Call That Resume Padding?

(cross-posted at http://www.tpmcafe.com)

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the stories about FEMA Director Michael Brown's padded resume were being released for the sole purpose of giving some cover to the White House in firing him: "The President is extremely disappointed that Brownie, umm, Mr. Brown, represented himself as holding qualifications he did not hold, and the President will not tolerate anything other than complete forthrightness," Scotty will say, presenting the president as the Stockard Channing character in Six Degrees of Separation.

But it's actually more like Bernie Kerik's nonexistent "nanny problem" because, in reality, Brown's resume wasn't all that padded. Sure he changed "Assistant to the City Manager" to "Assistant City Manager," added a couple of honors he hadn't gotten, and made it sound like he'd been practicing some law when he hadn't. But a real resume padder adds a couple of degrees from Stanford and a stint in Special Forces.

The important point is this: Even if every single thing on Brown's resume was true, it was still an obviously pathetic set of qualifications to run a major federal agency, or even to supervise the 30 lawyers in a federal agency's general counsel's office.

It is a little shocking that none of the Senators who participated in the 42-minute confirmation hearing that Laura Rozen linked to yesterday made any note that even Brown's padded resume was empty of any actual disaster management, or any management at all at any level above that of a very small city a quarter century ago!

And the liability now should rest entirely with the White House. They were not tricked into hiring someone who lied about his qualifications. They made the appointment with a total lack of interest in any qualification other than loyalty, and as this article suggests, may have been complicit in the exaggeration.

And, of course, the other four of the five top FEMA officials with no experience weren't hiding the fact that their careers had been spent as political advance men or ad makers.

This leads me to suggest an exercise, perfectly suited for the distributed talents of the blogosphere: Where's the next disaster? Are there other agencies where the top staff is so totally unqualified to the job at hand? Let's have some digging into those agency websites. Most propbably won't offer the potential for human tragedy that FEMA holds, but let's start with places like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (that director seems marginally qualified) that we know the administration doesn't care about. Foxes guarding the henhouse also qualify.

We might find out that FEMA was the one and only pure turkey farm, or we might find out that there are many other disasters waiting to happen. Use comments to post what you find.

Not More Spending, Better Spending

(cross-posted on tpmcafe.com)

This article from the Washington Post this morning makes an important point: Underfunding the Army Corps of Engineers was not the problem that caused flooding in New Orleans. The problem was that the Army Corps of Engineers spends money on the wrong things, pushed by members of Congress and its own inclinations.

"Liberal bloggers, Democratic politicians and some GOP defenders of the Corps have linked the catastrophe to the underfunding of the agency," the Post notes.

But the article points out that the Army Corps was already in the middle of a $748 million construction project right on the Industrial Canal where the most devastating breach occurred. Unfortunately, the project involved building a new lock on the canal, which had nothing to do with flood control and was justified by a prediction that barge traffic would increase, which has not occurred.

According to this study from the bipartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense, which is the best source for info on waste in the Army Corps and in big projects, the lock-replacement, the most expensive in U.S. history, would (or would have) caused horrible environmental damage to the same low-income neighborhoods that have been washed out by the storm. The report also notes that the major beneficiary of the new lock would be Bollinger Shipyards, Inc., "the only shipyard on the north side of the lock."

Incidentally, a quick search for Bollinger Shipyards on the Center for Responsive Politics site reveals that the company and the family that runs it are quite apolitical and seem to focus on their business.

Just kidding! -- the company and seven members of the Bollinger family have given $562,000 to candidates and political committees since 1998, 99% of it to local and out-of-state Republicans. The Bollingers were the fifth biggest contributor to Sen. David Vitter, identified in the Taxpayers for Common Sense report as a major advocate for the lock project.

But campaign graft is not the only thing going on here. The other part of the story is simply that the Army Corps likes to build big things. If you've ever read Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, which I think is one of the five or ten best books ever written about American politics, you'll be familiar with the tales of the Army Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation and their obsession with building big dams wherever they could. The book mostly deals with places where water is scarce, so it's not directly applicable to New Orleans, but my guess is that the same dynamic applies. Building up the levees and flood walls are mundane, long projects with no immediate payoff to anyone. Building a new lock, or a new dam, is what real men do.

According to the Post, Bush has increased appropriations for Louisiana Army Corps projects somewhat over the Clinton years, which isn't surprising. But much of this is a dynamic that goes on year after year, and the last President who really tried to break the power of the Army Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation, and their congressional backers was Jimmy Carter, one of his biggest mistakes.

It's very important that the liberal message here is not just "spend more money." Whether the issue is the Department of Homeland Security or the Army Corps, the point should be to spend the money have smartly, efficiently, in the public interest, and with the kind of cost-benefit analysis that puts the right value on disaster-prevention.