“Who Says Obama Can’t Lead?”: While Obama Is Exhibiting Leadership With Finesse, Republicans Have Run Into A Wall
Last week, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found President Obama tying his record low approval rating of 41 percent. NBC’s Chuck Todd, referring to another poll result showing that 54 percent of Americans “no longer feel that he is able to lead the country and get the job done,” told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “Essentially the public is saying, ‘Your presidency is over.’”
Similarly, political analyst Charlie Cook, citing Gallup survey data, wrote in National Journal, “There was a point when voters hit the mute button and stopped listening to George H.W. Bush and then to his son George W. Bush. We now seem to have reached that point with Obama.”
But one morsel from the NBC/WSJ poll didn’t fit that narrative: 67 percent of respondents are in favor of the president’s newly announced regulations “to set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants.” And when the pollsters re-asked the question, after presenting supporting and opposing arguments, including charges of “fewer jobs” and “higher prices,” approval held with a healthy 53 percent to 39 percent margin.
That’s a hell of a lot of support for a major presidential initiative from an electorate supposedly no longer listening to the president.
What did Obama do right?
Adhering to a favorite maxim of U.S. presidents of both parties that it’s remarkable how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit, Obama tapped EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to announce the plan and stump for it in media interviews. By keeping a relatively low-profile, Obama tempered the media’s tendency to polarize everything while dampening conservative backlash, a strategy that previously helped shepherd the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law and the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays and lesbians.
Additionally, the Obama administration avoided a united corporate front against the plan by reaching out to industries about to be regulated. While the U.S Chamber of Commerce chose to oppose the plan before it was released, the power plant industry’s main lobby refused to reinforce the attack. Instead, it released a positive statement expressing appreciation for the “range of compliance options” offered by the EPA.
The statement was short of an outright endorsement, leaving room for further negotiation. Days later, McCarthy began that negotiation, meeting with and winning praise from utility executives for “listening to the concerns that we had” and being “willing to have that dialogue.” With the utility industry signaling détente, Republicans couldn’t validate conservatives’ sky-is-falling claims with the voices of those most directly impacted by the proposed regulations.
While Obama was exhibiting leadership with finesse, Republicans decided to run into a wall. Instead of training their fire on the climate proposal in the days following the June 2 release, they obsessed over freed prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl. Whatever one’s opinion of the terms of the prisoner swap with the Taliban, it’s a done deal—and the climate rule is not. Republicans had a moment to redirect the climate debate for the duration of Obama’s presidency away from the losing effort of denying the science and toward the more fertile ground of jobs and prices. Myopically, they used that moment to chase the shiny object of the 24-hour news cycle.
Obama may not have been leading on climate in the conventional sense: preaching from the bully pulpit and rallying the public to pressure Washington to act. But prominent political scientists will tell you that’s not how presidential leadership usually works. As George Washington University professor John Sides explained to Slate, “The idea that presidents accomplish more if they give the right speech is magical thinking.”
Yet, the president has bucked the trend of history and successfully used the bully pulpit to advance another major goal: raising the minimum wage. Anticipating obstinacy from House Republicans, he told the states during his January 2014 State of the Union address, “You don’t have to wait for Congress to act.” He followed up that call with several outside-the-Beltway stump speeches urging states to raise their minimum wage above the federal standard.
The stumping is working. So far this year, eight states have raised their minimums and later this week Massachusetts will make it nine. Others may follow suit as more than 30 state legislatures have been compelled to consider minimum wage measures, and activists in eight states are pursuing November referendums. As with climate, this is not the kind of impact a president makes if the public has “stopped listening.”
But since bully pulpit tactics are not the norm of presidential leadership, it’s not all that important if the public doesn’t “tune in” to hear the president anymore. The test of a president’s leadership is whether he is in-tune enough with the public, and deft enough with the levers of power, to accomplish what is feasible.
If I were a Republican, I would not be savoring Obama’s 41 percent approval rating and presuming his presidency was done. I would be worried about my party’s 29 percent approval rating, its 15 percent level of support among Latinos and Obama’s plans to take executive action on immigration reform if House Republicans don’t act by July 31. If you think Obama isn’t able to lead on immigration, after what he has done on climate and minimum wage, you haven’t been paying attention.
By: Bill Scher, Contributor, Real Clear Politics, June 23, 2014
“Women Deserve Better”: Discrimination Is The Best Explanation For The Difference In Pay
Just two days ago President Obama made news in Pittsburgh by stating that equal pay for equal work not only benefits women, but also benefits families. In April, he signed an executive order that allows federal workers to share salary information and requires federal contractors to disclose more information about what their employees earn. On June 23, the Obama Administration will host a summit in Washington D.C. that focuses on creating a 21st century workplace, which includes equal pay for equal work.
The fact that this is still a topic that is making headlines in 2014 is alarming.
Almost half of the American workforce is female. In more and more situations, women are the primary breadwinners in their families. Pay disparity doesn’t just hurt women. It hurts their kids and their families. It hurts all Americans.
Opponents of equal pay have tried many times to explain away the wage gap. The most common argument they offer is that it simply does not exist. Opponents say that pay disparity based on gender is not based on sexism or discrimination, but rather on the choices that women make in terms of education, hours, and children. They argue that it is the biological and social forces that lead to a pay gap and therefore there is no point in pushing through legislation that could not possibly combat these realities. Opponents claim that discrimination isn’t the cause of the pay gap and that laws combating discrimination are not the solution.
Thankfully, the modern workplace has advanced beyond Mad Men-style sexism. However, this does not mean that discrimination is no longer a factor.
Senior advisers at the Department of Labor agree, “Discrimination is the best explanation of the remaining difference in pay.” Economists across the political spectrum attribute at least 40 percent of the pay gap to discrimination, not differences between workers or their jobs.
Sexual discrimination and the pay gap it causes are real problems and must be addressed.
Women earn an average 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, less if they are also a minority. In some professions, this gap is smaller. In others it’s wider. But no matter what the profession, even if it’s ‘only‘ a loss of 10 cents on the dollar, the gap is there, and it is solely related to the gender of the worker.
The solution is to elect representatives who recognize that equal work deserves equal pay, and that family wages are more important than corporate earnings. Just look at who voted for the Lily Ledbetter Act of 2009. If your representative voted ‘Nay‘, they believe that women should be paid less than men. Let’s get these ‘Mad Men’ out of office and allow common sense to prevail.
We are a nation founded on equality, built and sustained by women as well as men. Gender discrimination is completely and categorically unacceptable. Not only have women earned equal pay, they deserve it.
By: Jason Ritchie, The Huffington Post Blog, June 19, 2014
“God Save The United States From This Anti-Democratic Court”: SCOTUS Is Increasingly A Threat To Our Ideal Of Self-Government
Should a self-respecting democracy have a Supreme Court like ours, with the power to overturn democratic legislation? More and more progressive observers are not so sure. But one thing is clear: we need a more mature relationship with the Court and, through it, a more open and democratic relation to the Constitution.
Polls consistently find that the Court is the best-respected branch of government, well ahead of Congress and the presidency. A wave of critics, though, has been denouncing it as anti-democratic and regressive. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the U.C. Irvine law school and a prominent constitutional lawyer and scholar, is about to publish a book called The Case Against the Supreme Court, arguing that the Men in Black (more recently, Persons in Black) have done more harm than good on key issues like race, economic fairness, and preventing abuse of government power. Ian Millhiser, a constitutional analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, will publish a book by the same title next March. Further to the left, Jacobin has published a set of forceful attacks, summarized in Rob Hunter’s recent conclusion that “judicial interference with democracy” should become “unthinkable.”
The pendulum of anti-Court criticism has swung from left to right to left again in the last century. Progressives railed against a conservative, pro-market Court until Franklin Roosevelt finally knocked it back on its heels during the New Deal. In the 1960s, billboards in conservative parts of the country urged, “Impeach Earl Warren,” the liberal chief justice. Now, with the Court knocking out campaign finance regulation, parts of Obamacare, and the Voting Rights Act—plus menacing affirmative action, climate regulation, and labor rights—the left is remembering what it doesn’t like about letting justices review democratic legislation.
Apart from its ideological switches, the Supreme Court has two persistent anti-democratic features that might give a self-respecting democracy pause. First is that, although it is not always a conservative institution, it is always an elite one. Justices are picked from and mix in the highest echelons of the American professions. Tocqueville called professionals, especially lawyers, the American version of aristocracy, and the Supreme Court represents the aristocratic branch of the Constitution. This makes sense when they are deciding technical legal questions, but it raises more doubts when a democracy assigns a professional elite to work out the meaning of liberty and equality, or the right relationship between the federal government and the states.
The Court’s other anti-democratic feature is connected with its status as the best-respected branch of government. Its power, more than that of the presidency and much more than Congress’s, is symbolic, even mystical. The robes and the marble temple of the Supreme Court, the fact that oral arguments aren’t broadcast or photographed, all add to the mystique. They make the Court an oracular interpreter of the 225-year-old Constitution that serves as the most basic American law.
For this reason, it’s the rare radical democrat who will denounce the Supreme Court right down the line. Whatever they think of the Court’s other decisions, progressives will generally celebrate without reservation on the all-but-certain day when the Court established marriage equality nationwide. Most Americans think of the Constitution as being ultimately on their side, and identify the Constitution with the Supreme Court. When they agree with the Court’s decision, they tend to think the country has been called back to its best self. When they disagree, they tend to think there has been a regrettable, maybe terrible, mistake.
The perverse thing is that, when a country puts questions of basic principle into the hands of just a few interpreters, and gives those interpreters life tenure, the issue becomes less “What does equality mean to Americans?” than “What does equality mean to Justice Kennedy?” That is not a healthy question for democratic citizens to ask about their basic values. It is what would fit a monarchy better: “What is the king feeling today?”
Americans’ willingness to accept the Supreme Court’s mystical role is partly a symptom of disappointment in our own democratic capacities. Congress is the most directly representative body of the federal government, and almost no one sees it as having principled authority or moral charisma. Hoping that the Supreme Court will make us better than we can otherwise be, better than our own representative institutions, is neither self-respecting nor very likely to succeed.
We shouldn’t let the Court off the hook, though. The problem isn’t just that we date judicial review because we don’t think we deserve better. The Court maintains its own mystical charisma, especially by keeping out cameras, and, in recent decades, it has degraded the other institutions by clearing a broad path for big money to enter politics. It keeps itself special, and its decisions sometimes make other branches of government even more disappointing.
Big arguments about whether we should even have a Supreme Court with the power of judicial review are interesting, but there are equally important and more practical questions about what to do with the Court we have. Chemerinsky makes a couple of excellent practical suggestions, which others have also pressed.
First, opening the Court to cameras would let people see the justices for what they are: smart and well-trained human beings wrangling over hard, charged questions with knotty legal materials. It might drain the sense of the Court as an oracle, and bring home the reality that this is, basically, a very high-level committee of elite lawyers. That would open the question of which decisions we want such a committee to decide.
Second, and more radical, would be reconfiguring the Court. Chemerinsky suggests replacing life tenure with 18-year terms, meaning a new seat would open up every two years, and every president would get an equal number of appointments. This would make the Court’s relationship to the larger democracy less arbitrary. (Nixon appointed four justices in his first two years; Jimmy Carter got none.) Even more important, though, it would end the irritating and distorting tradition of the swing justice, whose temperamental sense of what justice requires matters more than either James Madison’s words or a majority of Americans’ considered views.
An even more radical step would be to replace the nine-person Court with a pool of senior and respected federal judges who would serve on rotating panels. A decision of such a panel would still be the last word on the question, but the judgments would reflect more of an average of legal expertise and seasoned judgment than the particular convictions of nine life-tenured justices.
The real advantage of these reforms is that they would be the beginning of an experiment in living with a less mystified Supreme Court and a more realistic idea of the relationship between judging and politics. In light of that experiment, future Americans could decide which questions they should trust to committees of lawyers and which they should decide more directly. Where democratic institutions are failing, as Congress is now, they might even ask how to revive them, rather than hope for a saving decision from the Court. That would be a step toward building a democracy that could respect itself—and deserve the respect.
By: Jedediah Purdy, The Daily Beast, June 22, 2014
“Veterans And Zombies”: The Hype Behind The Health Care Scandal
You’ve surely heard about the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A number of veterans found themselves waiting a long time for care, some of them died before they were seen, and some of the agency’s employees falsified records to cover up the extent of the problem. It’s a real scandal; some heads have already rolled, but there’s surely more to clean up.
But the goings-on at Veterans Affairs shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of a much bigger scandal: the almost surreal inefficiency and injustice of the American health care system as a whole. And it’s important to understand that the Veterans Affairs scandal, while real, is being hyped out of proportion by people whose real goal is to block reform of the larger system.
The essential, undeniable fact about American health care is how incredibly expensive it is — twice as costly per capita as the French system, two-and-a-half times as expensive as the British system. You might expect all that money to buy results, but the United States actually ranks low on basic measures of performance; we have low life expectancy and high infant mortality, and despite all that spending many people can’t get health care when they need it. What’s more, Americans seem to realize that they’re getting a bad deal: Surveys show a much smaller percentage of the population satisfied with the health system in America than in other countries.
And, in America, medical costs often cause financial distress to an extent that doesn’t happen in any other advanced nation.
How and why does health care in the United States manage to perform so badly? There have been many studies of the issue, identifying factors that range from high administrative costs, to high drug prices, to excessive testing. The details are fairly complicated, but if you had to identify a common theme behind America’s poor performance, it would be that we suffer from an excess of money-driven medicine. Vast amounts of costly paperwork are generated by for-profit insurers always looking for ways to deny payment; high spending on procedures of dubious medical efficacy is driven by the efforts of for-profit hospitals and providers to generate more revenue; high drug costs are driven by pharmaceutical companies who spend more on advertising and marketing than they do on research.
Other advanced countries don’t suffer from comparable problems because private gain is less of an issue. Outside the U.S., the government generally provides health insurance directly, or ensures that it’s available from tightly regulated nonprofit insurers; often, many hospitals are publicly owned, and many doctors are public employees.
As you might guess, conservatives don’t like the observation that American health care performs worse than other countries’ systems because it relies too much on the private sector and the profit motive. So whenever someone points out the obvious, there is a chorus of denial, of attempts to claim that America does, too, offer better care. It turns out, however, that such claims invariably end up relying on zombie arguments — that is, arguments that have been proved wrong, should be dead, but keep shambling along because they serve a political purpose.
Which brings us to veterans’ care. The system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs is not like the rest of American health care. It is, if you like, an island of socialized medicine, a miniature version of Britain’s National Health Service, in a privatized sea. And until the scandal broke, all indications were that it worked very well, providing high-quality care at low cost.
No wonder, then, that right-wingers have seized on the scandal, viewing it as — to quote Dr. Ben Carson, a rising conservative star — “a gift from God.”
So here’s what you need to know: It’s still true that Veterans Affairs provides excellent care, at low cost. Those waiting lists arise partly because so many veterans want care, but Congress has provided neither clear guidelines on who is entitled to coverage, nor sufficient resources to cover all applicants. And, yes, some officials appear to have responded to incentives to reduce waiting times by falsifying data.
Yet, on average, veterans don’t appear to wait longer for care than other Americans. And does anyone doubt that many Americans have died while waiting for approval from private insurers?
A scandal is a scandal, and wrongdoing must be punished. But beware of people trying to use the veterans’ care scandal to derail health reform.
And here’s the thing: Health reform is working. Too many Americans still lack good insurance, and hence lack access to health care and protection from high medical costs — but not as many as last year, and next year should be better still. Health costs are still far too high, but their growth has slowed dramatically. We’re moving in the right direction, and we shouldn’t let the zombies get in our way.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 19, 2014
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