The Doom Of Republican Economic Policy

The New York Times had some really great reporting today about the reality and politics of the federal government's SNAP (formally food stamps) program. It's a great portrait of people struggling at the fringes of American life in rural Tennessee including a 20 year old mechanic unable to find steady work to support himself, wife and one year old son, a woman who left her job in slaughterhouse after she got cancer (she get's the most at a whopping $352 a month to support a family of four) and a 62 year old former welder who can't work anymore because of lupus, this lucky ducky get's a $125 per month.

Juxtaposed to this is the new and improved Republican Party which is now making gutting SNAP, and other benefits like it, a high priority. As one Heritage Foundation scholar quoted in the article puts it, “I think food stamps have in the Republican mind become the symbol of an out-of-control, means-tested welfare state.” A standard bearer in this new struggle just happens to be the member of Congress that represents these folks:

Surrounded by corn and soybean farms — including one owned by the local Republican congressman, Representative Stephen Fincher — Dyersburg, about 75 miles north of Memphis, provides an eye-opening view into Washington’s food stamp debate. Mr. Fincher, who was elected in 2010 on a Tea Party wave and collected nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government from 1999 to 2012, recently voted for a farm bill that omitted food stamps. 

“The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country,” Mr. Fincher, whose office did not respond to interview requests, said after his vote in May. In response to a Democrat who invoked the Bible during the food stamp debate in Congress, Mr. Fincher cited his own biblical phrase. “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said. 

When someone get's $125 to buy food it's a national tragedy. We someone get's $3.5 million in farm subsidies, it's a statistic. 

This article got me think about an old Matt Yglesias article about a similar problem facing the GOP when it comes to raising the minimum wage. Basically the argument goes like this, the Republican Party knows it continual embrace of unpopular economic policies is costing it at the ballot box and making it harder to win elections. But the hardline nature of modern conservatives and conservative organizations makes it impossible to embrace any practical solutions to things like poverty, food scarcity or rising inequality. To paraphrase Yglesias this is not because there are no conservative thinkers with policies about how to tackle these problems, but because none of those policies is going to be embraced in practice by Republican politicians. For one because if they are, those politicians would get RINOed. And second because as Ayn Rand taught us long ago, taking from the rich to give to the poor isn't just bad policy, it fundamentally morally evil and thus can never be accepted.

Now Republicans could of course respond to this by promoting their own ideas about how to help struggling families. They could embrace Milton Friedman's idea of a negative income tax, or a higher earned income tax credit, or a bigger tax deduction for dependents, or any other policy you'd like to suggest. But of course they won't, for the reasons outlined above. Meanwhile some politicians will keep trying to throw up smoke screens about how they are "concerned about these issues" and that's probably the best the GOP can hope for. Meanwhile we'll be stuck with the same you-didn't-build-that/47%/Lucky-Duckies GOP we've had for a quite a while.

Perverse Incentives In The GOP

Grance Franke-Ruta has a piece up at the Atlantic trying to explain why House Republicans keep voting to repeal Obamacare in vain. As she sees it, it's because of an "ideological fixation" or the 19th Century psychological concept of an Idées fixes as seen in literary figures like Captain Ahab. It's one of those interesting arguments that makes for good filler on a website but personally I think these types of psychological explanations for problems in the modern GOP are less than helpful.

The main reason that Republican politicians do things like vote over and over again to repeal Obamacare while offering no counter proposal of their own is because of structural, not psychological reasons.  Over the last few decades the conservative movement has set up a huge infrastructure of money making ventures that conservatives figures and Republican politicans can tap into to make a lot of money. Like books, TV jobs and cushy think tank positions that are yours for the taking as long as you tote the conservative hard line. Boston based journalist David Bernstein has argued that a lot conservative movement works not as an ideological movement, but a private industry that creates conservative "products" to be sold to a vast market of older, white suburbanites with large amounts of disposable income. Think of Glenn Beck, who talks about the oncoming economic collapse we are facing because of things like deficit spending and then goes on TV and radio as a paid spokesman to hawk over priced gold coins as a sure fire way to protect your investments during the future economic collapse. Rick Perlstein once wrote a great history of the creation of this market in The Baffler.

The result is that perverse incentives are set up inside the GOP that leads intelligent, rational people to hawk bizarre conspiracy theories or push for "investigations" of made up scandals because there is a big pot of gold at the end of their career rainbow. Meanwhile, if you criticize the conservative movement for being unrealistic, bad for the country or not very good at stopping Obama, you get fired from your think tank job for writing things like this.

There are a number of other structural problems with the Republican Party right now, for example the massive policy gap that's opened between them and the Democrats. As well as an aversion to normal compromise and negotiation that we've seen in recent years. Indeed, a functioning political party would probably accept it's can't overturn or "defund" a law when it only controls one half of one third of the government. But the reason for this dysfunction isn't physiological manias, it's structural. Which is why the GOP won't fix itself just by getting rid of a few blow hards like Michele Bachmann.

It's Called Partisanship

Jonathan Chait has a funny piece up showing the ridiculous nature of how conservatives can relate to "government power."  He points out that the same federal judge that threw out Obamacare a few years ago, a guy named Roger Vinson, ironically also okayed the NSA program that resulted in a massive tracking of phone metadata that's been in the news recently.  Vison sees grave danger in the government requiring people to purchase health insurance:

If [the government] it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting — as was done in the Act — that compelling the actual transaction is itself “commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce,” it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted. 

And at the same time he  sees nothing wrong with an interpretation of the Patriot Act that says the government has the ability to record the details about every phone call ever made in the the country.

Chait sees this as just another example of conservatives behaving badly, and it certainly is.  But what it really shows is that partisan dynamics in American politics are at least as important as ideological ones, if not more so.  In order for America's two political parties to work they have to get a lot of different groups and individuals to agree on broad base of policies they favor and then work to get that party elected and enact that policy framework.  Sometimes this is easy, people who want to cut taxes probably don't care about increasing unemployment insurance programs that much either.  Other people might just care about one issue, like abortion, and not care too much about the other stances there party takes.  But sometimes it can be hard.  In this case, economic libertarians have to check their libertarian hats at the door when comes to national security issues in order for libertarians to build a viable party with neoconservative hawks and other groups that favor a big robust national security state. 

This results in a dynamic that is great for bringing groups into your coalition, but there's nothing about it that will help insure an ideological consistent platform for the party.  This is why the GOP can call for "cutting spending" and then blast Obama for "cutting medicare" when his proposes doing that to reduce the deficit.  Or they can bemoan the deficit and defense cuts at the same time.  It's ideologically inconsistent, but it makes perfect sense for a party that wants to attack Obama for something and spend a lot on the military. 

So while it may be ridiculous for a party to blast "government overreach" and predict a Orwellian nightmare world in the future if people get access to health care and then turn around and have no problem with tracking everyone's phone calls, this is the product of partisan incentives to bring security hawks into the same party and economic libertarians.  It might show the shallowness or hypocrisy of people involved, and this can happen with Democrats too, but it doesn't show a problematic ideology.  These sorts of give and takes are necessary to hold the modern GOP coalition together.

The Ever Expanding Culture War

One thing I've noticed of late about conservative politics is how many issues seem to being drawn in a culture war model of political discussion. By culture war I mean a description of an issue or policy as not just wrong on the merits but someone morally offensive and a dire threat to American civilization. Paul Krugman recently found a great example of this in an article denouncing New York City's new bike sharing program Citi Bike in Front Page magazine:

Bicycles are one of the obsessions of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation secretary Janette Sadik-Khan. Khan is the granddaughter of Imam Alimjan Idris, a Nazi collaborator and principle teacher at an SS school for Imams under Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The bio of his son, Wall Street executive Orhan Sadik-Khan, frequently mentions the bombing of the family home in Dresden and surviving trying times after World War II. It neglects to mention that the times were only trying because their side was losing…

In partial revenge, Khan has made many New York streets nearly as impassable as those of her grandfather’s wartime Dresden.

Remember this is the response of a conservative political magazine to the popular idea of allowing people to rent bikes to ride around America's densest city.

These types of bizarre denunciations aren't just limited to more obscure magazines however.  None other than the Wall Street Journal recently ran a video editorial that denounced the Nazi bike plot with such choice gems as, "Do not ask me to enter the minds of the totalitarians running this city." and, "The bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise."  While it's true that the Journal has had a conservative editorial board since time immemorial, what is fascinating is how the supply side economics and tax cuts conservatism of yesterday is being replaced with Fox News style rabble rousing and culture war.

It's not just bike sharing that is getting drawn into a culture war model of politics either.  Recently Virgina's Republican Governor Bob McDonnell tried to impose a $100 annual fee on owners of hybrid and electric cars.  While North Carolina's state legislature has been trying to stop Tesla from selling their popular electric cars anywhere in the entire state.  One would think that conservative Republicans would like the idea of a new car company coming to town to do business, free enterprise and all that right?  Well if it's associated with liberals in must be bad, and must be stopped.  The entire fate American civilization hangs in the balance.  Or on the pedal, as it were.    

The World as Ross Douthatblog Sees It

Ross Douthat has a blog post up entitled "The World As Wonkblog Sees It" pushing back at Ezra Klein in the latest round of debate over Republican and conservative "reformers."  Klein had argued in an earlier post that conservative writer Josh Barro is forced to become combative with the GOP and its internet loyalists because of big changes over policy that have left reasonable realists like Barro out in the cold.  As Klein argues:

Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative. The result is that the range of policies you can hold and still be a Republican is much narrower than it was in, say, 2005. That’s left a lot of once-Republican wonks without an obvious political home.

He also sees this is health care:

The basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act is, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, a Republican idea. It was first proposed in a 1993 plan that had 20 Senate Republicans as co-sponsors. It was passed and implemented by Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. It was supported by Newt Gingrich...

In fact, they [Republicans] pretty much abandoned all ideas related to universal coverage, or even big expansions of coverage. They decided some of them were downright unconstitutional. Today, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor can’t even get high-risk pools past his members. The health policy space on the right is radically narrower than it was a decade ago. If you’re a Republican who hasn’t been willing to change your positions on those issues, you’re a heretic today.

Klein also points out the big changes when it comes to climate issues:

There was a time when Republicans were leading the way on ideas to fight climate change. The first cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions was introduced into the Senate by Sen. John McCain. The McCain/Palin ticket included a cap-and-trade plank. Some Republicans, like Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, supported a carbon tax.

There’s no serious support in today’s Republican Party for doing anything about climate change...Today’s Republican Party doesn’t want a cap-and-trade plan or a carbon tax or even money for renewable energy research. Whereas a decade ago a policy wonk who worried about the future of the earth could comfortably fit in the GOP, today, anyone who wants to do anything serious about climate change has been written out of the party.

Klein then goes on to argue this shows much a hypothetical "policy scale" going to the Democrats while the GOP retreats into a narrower and narrow field of possible policies to embrace.

While, like Douthat, I am skeptical of these sorts of rating scales I think Klein's analysis really gets to the heart of the "policy free" politics a lot of Republicans are doing these days.  Douthat gives away the game when he tries to push back:

First, you can’t just bracket the “why” of the G.O.P.’s shift without downplaying the ways in which the basic ground of our policy debates has shifted since 2006 as well. For instance, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade bill might have looked like a sensible-centrist “5″ back when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich were sharing a couch. But back then we were pre-crash and thought we were considerably richer than we actually were; back then the prospects for a meaningful global climate treaty looked much better than they do post-Copenhagen; back then global temperatures were expected to rise faster in the short term than they actually have; and back then we hadn’t yet knocked our own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1994 levels without a cap and trade bill.

To be sure Douthat is correct that carbon emissions have gone down in this country.  However he neglects the fact that this is largely due to a massive recessions and policies the, like higher mileage standards for cars and trucks, that the GOP fought against for decades.  But even worse Republicans are largely arguing global warming doesn't exist not that it can't be addressed because of the economic downturn.  My favorite example of this is Charles Baker's response to questions about global warming when ran for Governor in Massachusetts [!], "I don't believe in the boogie monster."  Thank you Mr. Baker

The problem here is that Douthat is doing exactly what Klein laments pundits like Douthat and Frum do when confronted the GOP's policy black holes:

The choices for Republican policy wonks are stark.  You can take the approach of Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru and evince a continual disappointment that the Republican Party doesn’t embrace more new ideas and be constantly on the lookout for glimmers of hope that never quite seem to herald the coming of dawn.

Exactly.

I'm not asking for Douthat to go all Barro and Frum and come out swinging in his next column, that's just not his style.  But if he continues down the road of making excuses for people like Charles Baker or Darrell Issa, he's not going to get anywhere.  It's time for Douthat to confront the party he has, not the party he wished he had,

Inside The Outside In DC

Josh Barro is something of a conservative "It Boy" among a lot of the blogosphere as of late.  This is in no small part because he identifies as a conservative and a Republican, but is completely willing to criticize his own side when he thinks they deserve it.  Here's him explaining why the GOP's attempt to destroy the world economic by deliberately causing the US to default payments on our debt is a bad idea.  In short he's a conservative Republican, but a pretty reasonable guy who is trying to reform the GOP.

Erick Erickson is another type of conservative Republican.  He's a professional bloviating pundit who says outrageous stuff on CNN and runs a blog dedicated to changing the GOP.  He also see's himself as a reformer but of a different stripe.  Erickson sees reforming the GOP as being a project dedicated to taking away power from "insiders" or the "establishment" and giving it away to others, i.e. him.  Recently he and Barro went to war. 

Fights over who's the "real conservative" have always struck me as being pretty boring.  But one thing this the Barro/Erickson exchange did illuminate for me is that political fights over who is the "outsider" and who is the "insider," or who is the "establishment" are just a waste of time.  Everyone sees themselves as an "outsider" fighting against the "establishment"  in modern American politics.

Erickson tried to make this point by using geography as an indicator of who is this outsider and who is the insider:

The real conservative reformers have to fight it out in the already crowded space for reform with the poseurs. But once we get to them, we are presented with the original problem mentioned above. They are in New York and Washington.

Those of us outside Washington and New York should not think ourselves superior to them because of geography or biography. But we should all recognize that the DC-NY corridor of conservative thinkers have a steep hill to climb these days. The public, regardless of party, loathes Washington and the elites. Merely by virtue of geography, many of them are tainted. Thus they must try harder to connect to the real world.

This is a strange argument to make.  Especially since it ignores the fact that "outsider" Erickson goes on CNN to explain "what conservatives want" or "what the GOP needs to do" all the time.  This gives Erickson more influence over conservative politics and the GOP that 99.9% of other people who would affiliate themselves with either of those two lables.

This trend doesn't just apply to talking heads.  I'm sure lots of GOP Senators see themselves as "outsiders" and such even though any one member of the United States Senate can wield tremendous influence in Washington.  The same goes for Governors or committee chairs in the House of Representatives to a lesser extent.  Maybe this is because of the defuse nature of power in our system of government, even the powerful don't wield that much absolute power, so even when you have power you still see your self as an insurgent battling an entrenched powerful enemy.  Or maybe it is the legacy of the counter culture of the 1960's; everyone stills sees the world in terms of noble individuals battling corrupt institutions.  Or maybe it is just that we'd all rather root for the Rebel Alliance or the Starks than the Empire or the Lannisters.  Whatever the cause, if you are involved in politics you are already on the "inside" to some degree, the real "outsiders" are people who aren't involved at all.  

The 90's Can Help With That Reihan!

Conservative blogger Reihan Salam wrote a piece where he bemoaned the recent plunging deficit figures as a potential disaster for the Republican Party in 2016.  As he sees it without a big deficit the GOP will lose both its leverage for entitlement reform and its main argument to be made with middle class voters:

James Pethokoukis cites a new report from Potomac Research to suggest that there is at least a slim chance that the U.S. federal government will achieve a budget surplus by fiscal year 2015. Pethokoukis makes the most important political points — a surplus will make it difficult for the Obama administration to make the case for further tax increases, yet it will also undermine the case for entitlement reform. But to be cynical and political for a moment, a surplus would be even worse news for the Republican Party. Since the start of the Obama presidency, the GOP has put all of its eggs in the basket of short- to medium-term fiscal consolidation.

So imagine 2016 in the unlikely but not completely impossible event that a budget surplus does materialize. Republican elevation of the deficit issue will allow the Obama administration and its Democratic allies to declare “mission accomplished,” all without taking the blame for entitlement reform. The House-passed budget that promised a balanced budget within the ten-year budget window by making unrealistically deep cuts in Medicaid and domestic discretionary spending will continue to be hung around the necks of congressional Republicans. One hopes that one or several of the GOP presidential candidates will devise a more compelling economic message and reform agenda.

Salam is right that as the deficit shrinks, fear mongering over it will become more and more difficult as will claims that we will soon turn into Greece.  I also love how he seems to think that Obama wants to raise taxes just to raise taxes (Matt Yglesias pointed out how wrong this idea is back in 2005).  But he is missing the broader point, the GOP hasn't cared about deficits for a while.

As far as I can tell the the battle inside the Republican Party to see if they were actually interested in balancing budgets was lost back in the early 80's.  If you go way back, think Eisenhower or Dewey, you do see a political party interested in balancing budgets, by doing things like cutting military spending or raising taxes, but since Reagan the GOP has always favored cutting taxes over lower deficits.  The last last hurah of the balanced budget Republicans was in 1980 when George H. W. Bush famously called Reagan's so called "supply side" economic plan to massively cut taxes, expand military spending AND balance the budget "voodoo economics."  Bush of course lost to the Gipper in the primaries.  Ever since then the GOP has thrown the laws of mathematics out the window and focused on cutting taxes no matter what this does to deficit figures.

So if we did have a budget surplus in 2016 the GOP strategy is simple.  They claim that the surplus is because of Paul Ryan's "tough fiscal management" or something and demand a big tax cut for the rich because it will create jobs or the American people can spend their money better than the Government can or whatever.  They then fear monger about a made up entitlement "crisis" and roll out a plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare.  In fact even if there isn't a surplus they will still call for tax cuts to create jobs or whatever.  This is precisely what happened in the 90's; as the deficit shrunk Republicans in Congress called for Clinton to "now take on Social Security" and once they got in the White House they passed a big tax cut and deficits ceased to matter.  They will almost certainly follow a similar strategy in the future.

The Triumph of Ayn Rand

There is an interesting internet fight because noted liberal blogger and purveyor of general awesomeness Matt Yglesias is getting criticized cause he and his wive recently purchased an expensive condo.  Well sort of expensive, 1.2 million for a three bedroom three bath join in Logan Circle.  To us peasants in the Midwest this might look unseemly, but that's how ridiculous property prices are in DC (because "historical preservation" is more important that economic development, but that's another story).  But ANYWAY conservatives are outraged because Matt and his wife bought a nice home.

The interesting thing I find here is the belief from conservative blogs and news organs that this thing is some sort of hypocrisy or outrage.  How dare some liberal be rich!  Of course these are statements of profound ignorance when it comes to American History.  FDR was as loaded as you could ever wish and the Kennedy's were not far behind.  Heck even Obama is a millionaire largely do to his book deals.  So why are people freaking out about the fact that a liberal blogger bought a house instead of living in the gutter?  I'd argue that it really doesn't make much sense at all our side of the ideology of Ayn Rand.  It's completely reasonable for conservatives to argue they don't think taxes should be higher or to end things like the Earned Income Tax Credit.  But such a conservative shouldn't automatically think that all rich people must believe these items of conservative dogma.

Rand is a very important figure in the development of 20th Century conservative thought that can still be felt to this day. None other than Paul Ryan has cited her as an important inspiration in his own political career (he has walked these comments back to some degree). Back in 2009 Jonathan Chait wrote a great article linking the emergence of new types of rhetoric in the age of Obama directly to Rand:

It [tea party rhetoric] expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand.

I won't go into the whole story of Rand here, it's much to long and much to boring for longwalkdownlyndale, but her core belief that rich people who don't become libertarians are some sort of hypocritical "class traitors" is one of the few ways to explain the anger against Yglesias.

If you do want to learn more about the weird world of Rand, I would recommend that Chait piece or this great film about her and her relationship with Allen Greenspan and other apostles of the Church of the Free Market. 
  

Conservativism's Information Disadvatage

Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic pointed out yesterday a troubling trend with many of the news organs of modern conservatism, namely they often get basic facts and predictions wrong, which in turn does their readers a great disservice: 

Americans who get their news from anti-Hagel conservatives discovered Tuesday that much of the analysis they've long been fed on this subject left them as misinformed about the likely course of events as they were about Mitt Romney's prospects for victory during Election 2012. Of course, a single nomination battle isn't nearly so consequential as a presidential election. This is nevertheless another reminder for the rank-and-file on the right: Demand better from the journalists whose work you patronize, or remain at an information disadvantage relative to consumers of a "mainstream media" that is regularly outperforming conservative journalists.

Friedersdorf has recorded a rather impressive list of conservative writers who get paid to keep their readers informed doing the exact opposite over the past few months.  One that stands out is the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin who as early as 2010 was responding to suggestions about Hagel as a Secretary of Defense with statements like "Maybe this is a trial balloon. If it's more than that, it will go over like a lead one." And as recently as February 11th with statements like:

When a Democratic insider and top adviser to President Obama like Stephanie Cutter laughs on the Sunday shows at the prospect of defending Chuck Hagel, you know things are not going well. She essentially said that the disastrous hearing doesn't matter.

The point here is not that Rubin is a sorry excuse for a journalist and the Washington Post should be embarrassed to keep her on the pay roll, although she is and they should be, it's that this sort of coverage makes the jobs of conservative readers who are trying to stay informed about politics that much harder.  To make matter worse, when the events that other journalist have been predicting do in fact come to past, conservatives who depend on people like Rubin to stay informed must be left dumbstruck and politics becomes even more impenetrable.  Why on earth did some guy who hates Israel and wants Iran to get the Bomb get confirmed by the Senate?  The obvious answer is that Hagel doesn't have those views and since he has no personal scandals he's likely to get confirmed, like every other Secretary of Defense, but you'd never learn that from reading Rubin.  I'd wager that this is in no small part a reason for conservatives to be more prone to a lot of conspiracy theories out there.  If the economy is not improving according to Rush, even though it is according to CNN or The New York Times, the idea that people in the Government invented monthly job report numbers makes much more sense.

Ironically its conservatives themselves that should be the most outraged by things like this as in the long run it only makes their attempts to get politicians they like elected and policies they like enacted that much harder.
   

The Hackdom of Ted Cruz

The New Yorker had a great piece by Jane Mayer about how Ted Cruz, the freshmen GOP Senator from Texas, has declined from once the hope of the conservative movement to a pathetic hack who infuriates members of his own caucus and acts like Joe McCarthy.  Mayer points out that some of Cruz's rhetoric makes Rush Limbaugh look reasonable by saying thing like, “[President Obama] would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” because:

There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists!  There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.

Mayer called up Reagan's former solicitor general Charles Fried whose now a faculty member at Harvard who quickly points out that its just not true, the are several Republicans on the faculty and no "Communists overthrowing the United States government."  That's text book McCarthyism right there.

This raises the why someone who is supposedly a smart person would resort to these kinds of tactics.  Jonathan Bernstein at A Plain Blog About Politics speculates it's all about the incentives in the modern GOP.  That is, this type of over the top rhetoric will get you on Fox News and other conservative outlets which will raise your profile which is crucial for all sorts of elaborate money making schemes.  I completely agree but I do think another factor might be in play.  Saying inflammatory things on TV is really easy compared to say, crafting legislation that will work well and will get out of committee and get through the 60 vote Senate and get through the House and can have any difference between the bills ironed out in conference committee and not get vetoed by the President.  That process, called the legislative process, is a lot harder than yelling, because yelling and calling people names is easy.  So is Ted trying to pump up his profile and/or get a seat on the Koch brothers gravy train?  Probably.  But it's also possible that this man is just a lazy lout who would rather rest of the laurels of calling the President a communist than try and be a good Senator.

More on the Policy Gap

Political Scientist Jonathan Bernstein made a great point on the Washington Post's Plumline Blog in response to something Ramesh Ponnaru wrote in the New York Times.  Ponnaru argued that the GOP should stop focusing on rekindling the glories of the 1980's and instead focus on economic and tax policies that make sense for today.  Bernstein argues, in my view correctly, that the problem is even worse than that:

The problem with Republicans today on public policy isn’t that they’re stuck in the 1980s; it’s that they’ve given up entirely. More often than not, what passes for Republican “policy” is just symbolic, not substantive.

And you can see this all the time right now.  Bernstein points out the major gaps; the missing replace side of "repeal and replace Obamacare," the fact that John McCain can't even explain what the "coverup" of Benghazi even is and the 20 year obsession with passing a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment to name a few. 

Increasingly "conservative" policy proposals are coming from liberals who bring up their ideas in occasional "here's what the GOP should be doing" type pieces.  In response to Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage, Matt Yglesias pointed out that the sensible path would be for the GOP to oppose the increase and purpose their own substitute policies.  Alas, as Yglesias points out, that's just not going to happen:

So something else they could do is take up one of several alternative policies that economists tend to like better. They could embrace a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. They could embrace a Guaranteed Basic Income. They could target their assistance at families with a bigger refundable child tax credit. But they're not going to do any of those things either. Nor are they going to say that the real solution is expansionary monetary policy to create tight labor markets and the chance for workers to obtain higher market wages without government intervention. They're just going to offer nothing, until at some point Democrats have enough seats to pass the minimum wage hike or a handful of Republicans defect and join them.

Exactly.  Yglesias goes on to point out that this is because the GOP is opposed in principle to policies with the goals like raising the minimum wage because they are oppose in principle to the idea of the government regulating "market outcomes" with things like minimum wage bills.  As he puts it:

This isn't because there are no conservative thinkers with better ideas than a minimum wage hike, but because none of those ideas will be embraced in practice by Republican politicians or deployed by the conservative movement in any way other than as a smokescreen.

Which I would say is true.  But as Bernstein pointed out, the problem is even worse than that.  Even if a Marco Rubio wanted to find policies to promote instead of a minimum wage hike there aren't even any out there for him to go to in think tanks or with other GOP allied party actors.  Making the problem even worse than we think it is.

Rubio's Policy Gap and An Update

A lot of the commentary about Marco Rubio's response to Obama's State of the Union is focusing on some of the goofier stuff, like the water break, the "I Dream of Jeannie" looking set or the sad fact that he didn't just blurt out what he obviously really wanted to.  What struck me was how little substance the speech actually had.  Andrew Sullivan saw it as a "pathetic, exhausted, vapid response" and while I'd agree that it was all of those things it struck me as being more than just another lame speech.  If it was anything it was another illustration of the "policy gap" that has developed between the two parties.

Matt Ygleisas has a great list of the numerous different and specific policy proposals Obama outlined in the State of the Union last night that includes links to all sorts of progressive/Democratic allied groups and experts about how to move forward.  Compare that to Rubio's talk where he said things like, "And because tuition costs have grown so fast, we need to change the way we pay for higher education. I believe in federal financial aid."  That's all well and good but what does he propose to do specifically?  More pell grants?  More community colleges?  Since Rubio didn't elaborate other than to tell us what he "believes in" your guess is as good as mine.  The same thread was apparent in Eric Cantor's much lauded speech a few weeks ago where he proposed fixing our budget deficit by zeroing out the $11 million dollars in grants the National Science Foundation gives to the study of political science.  And who can forget the mother of all policy black holes: Republicans have been vowing to "repeal and replace" Obamacare for the last two plus years, and while they've voted to repeal it over 30 times in the House no bill to replace it has been introduced or even discussed in either chamber of Congress.

A fashionable criticism of Obama over the past four years has been he needs to stop "campaigning" and "start governing."  The idea here is that Obama's big rallies and speeches he does for issues from time to time are not effective and he needs to spend more time in Washington or something.  While I think this kind of criticism is a bit silly, public speeches are a part of a presidents job, I have realized that a similar concept does apply to the modern GOP.  Over the past 20 years Republicans have increasingly replaced the language and reality of policy with boilerplate campaign rhetoric.  You saw this a lot last night with Rubio.  The economic section of the speech was largely confined to: "And more government isn’t going to inspire new ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs.  It’s going to create uncertainty."  Later Rubio criticizes the upcoming sequester cuts as being "devastating."  So government isn't the answer, but cutting it is devastating, but what we want is smaller government.  This sort of incoherence isn't a flaw in Marco Rubio, its a flaw in a political party that no longer attempts to understand or explain complex policy issues and instead has built its rhetoric and discussion of policy around gimmicks and the use of buzzwords.

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In other news, I have a lot more free time on my hands these days as the project I was working on ended on Friday.  So, I'll be updating this blog a lot more, maybe even as much as once a day.  Anyway thanks again for reading and check back soon!

What's Wrong With The GOP

It's not a lot of fun being a Republican Party leader these days.  Between being rejected at the polls last November and the never ending series of calamities that are befalling the GOP on Capitol Hill (think Sandy aid, Fiscal Cliff, Plan B and now their cave on the debt ceiling) the party just doesn't seem to be working very well.  In looking at this dysfunction political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently pointed out two points that show the GOP is suffering something more than just poor leadership:

What sort of serious, substantive policy initiatives like this could Republicans push on their side? There isn’t anything. And that’s the crux of their problem.

The core of the GOP agenda remains the Ryan budget, but that had very few specific cuts and the numbers never actually added up. They certainly could continue trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they’ve long since given up on offering a replacement.

Republicans, that is, don’t actually have a program with popular items that they could run on and then pass if they won. After all, they didn’t run on their Medicare program in 2010 and 2012; instead, they called anyone who accused them of cutting Medicare a liar and instead ran against Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare. What exactly is the GOP equivalent, just in terms of swing-voter popularity, of Lilly Ledbetter or SCHIP right now? Beating up on Planned Parenthood?

And he right, there is a shockingly large policy gap between our two parties these days.  Questions about how to create jobs or improve the lot of the middle class constituencies that decide presidential elections are answered, if they are answered at all, with the same boiler plate of tax cuts and de-regulation that conservatives have been preaching for over 30 years now.  Not only do these policies have poor track records over the last 20 years but they are also unpopular with the American electorate who do support things like higher taxes on the wealthy. 

Bernstein was writing to point that the conservative commentator Phillip Klein had actually been on to something when he suggested that Republicans could learn a lot from how Democrats acted after they won control of both houses of Congress in 2006:

[I]t’s worth looking back at the Democrats’ strategy following their takeover of Congress in 2006. Despite their strong rhetoric, they ultimately caved to President Bush by agreeing to continue funding the Iraq War. This generated a forceful backlash among their base, but it also enabled them to continue running against Bush’s handling of Iraq, rather than allowing Bush to change the subject to “Democrats don’t care about our troops.” 

During this time, Democrats also pushed legislation that furthered their agenda — including an expansion of the children’s health care program SCHIP (which Bush vetoed) and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (which Republicans blocked in the Senate). Both bills were quickly passed and enacted once Obama became president.

Klein is right that this is a better model than threatening to destroy the world economy if you don't get your way, but his commentary betrays another problem with the GOP.  Saying that Democrats "ultimately caved to President Bush by agreeing to continue funding the Iraq War" strikes me me as simply a new Green Lantern Theory of politics, call it the The Green Lantern Theory of Congress.  According to this theory the only thing that accounts of Congress's inability to change national policy, in this case the Iraq War, is a lack of Congressional will.  Like the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency this theory is simply not grounded in the reality of how of system of government works.  The reality is that because of the Constitutional designation of the President as the Commander in Chief of the military, the President enjoys broad latitude in the use of force internationally.  Furthermore the legacy of American involvement in two World Wars and one Cold War in the most violent century in the history of human civilization has curtailed Congresses role in foreign policy as well.  So even if the Democrats wanted to end the war in 2007 they couldn't, not because of a lack of will power, but because that not how foreign policy in the US works.  Looking at Klein's Green Lantern Theory of Congress things like the debt ceiling fight suddenly make sense.  The problem is that the GOP is trying to force policies on the nation while it only controls one half of the legislative branch of the government.  The idea that the exists some way to do this, rather than accepting that the realities of divided government entail compromises and a limited agenda, results in doing things like threatening to destroy the world economy unless your demands are met.

These two structural factors, a lack of concrete policy prescriptions and the unfounded belief that political actors are only constrained by their lack of will go a long way at explaining why the GOP has become so dysfunctional, and why it will continue to be so.