“Chill, People!”: Hey, Warren Fans; Hillary Would Be The Most Liberal Nominee In Your Lifetime
So, Hillary’s taken a few questions from the press now. But something more interesting than that has been happening over the past month: She has moved to the left or signaled her intention to do so on a pretty broad range of issues. All of you who want Elizabeth Warren in the race? Chill, people. She practically is.
Now, for all I know it might make the Clinton people cringe to see me write that, because it surely provides some degree of ammo for the right. But I reckon the right would have noticed this without my intervention, so my conscience is clear. But this is the emerging reality: If you are a 40-something Democrat who has voted over the years for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry and Barack Obama, it’s looking like you are about to cast a vote next year for the most liberal Democratic nominee of your voting lifetime.
Start with the two positions she’s taken since the announcement video that have probably gotten the most attention. Her immigration position is considerably more aggressive than Obama’s, expanding his executive actions to allow more people to obtain work permits. Then, on prisons, she famously called for the end of the era of mass incarceration. The speech was filled with pleas to get low-level and nonviolent offenders out of prison and with sentences like “there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes.”
There’s a lot more where that came from, usually announced, or mentioned, in those meetings with voters that the press following her so loathe. Here are the four most notable ones. These aren’t fully fleshed-out policy proposals, but presumably those will come:
• She told an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, that the country needs a free and universal pre-kindergarten program.
• At Tina Brown’s Women in the World summit in New York, she called for greatly expanded after-school and child-care programs.
• Also in Keene, she came out for closing the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, and the rhetoric was pretty populist, as she told furniture workers: “You are in the production of goods, and I want to do everything I can to support goods and real services and take a hard look at what is now being done in the trading world, which is just trading for the sake of trading. And it’s just wrong that a hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a nurse or a trucker or an assembly worker here at Whitney Brothers.”
• And most important from my personal point of view, she’s been speaking out strongly in favor of paid family and medical leave, saying to a questioner at a Norwalk, Iowa, roundtable: “Well, boy, you are right on my wavelength because, look, we are the last developed country in the world that has no national paid leave for parenting, for illness. And what we know from the few states that have done it—California being most notable here—is it builds loyalty. If you really analyzed turnover in a lot of businesses where you have to retrain somebody—well, first you have to find them and then you have to retrain them—making your employees feel that you care about these milestones in their lives and you give them the chance to have a child, adopt a child, recover from a serious illness, take care of a really sick parent and get a period of time that’s paid just cements that relationship.”
These six positions—along with her support for a much higher minimum wage that’s indexed to inflation—almost by themselves make Clinton the most on-paper progressive candidate (and putative nominee) since who knows when. She is saying things that one never thought the Hillary Clinton of 10 or 20 years ago would have said.
It may be true that it’s less that she’s changed than that the times have, and she’s adapting. But hey, give her credit for adapting. Last summer, during her book tour, she said she didn’t think paid family leave was possible. Now, she’s talking like someone who isn’t merely describing a crappy reality but someone who sees that the point is to change it.
There are some important positions she hasn’t taken yet. On the TPP trade agreement, most obviously, which is one on which I think she might go against the left, although I’m just guessing. I want to see what she has to say down the road about entitlements. Something tells me, the way she’s been talking so far, that there won’t be much emphasis on grand bargains and being responsible and raising the retirement age. I’ll be curious to see, for example, whether she endorses raising the payroll tax cap. I went to see West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin speak at Brookings the other day, and he said he’d gladly support raising the cap to help fix the entitlements’ insolvency problems. If Joe can say it, can Hillary?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column urging liberals to suck it up and accept the fact that Hillary Clinton was the choice and there’s too much at stake and there’s nothing else to do so just get over it and support her. That column didn’t say much about her positions. It was just about the Supreme Court and what a nightmare Republican rule would be.
But at the rate she’s going, very little sucking it up will be required. She’s turning into a bona fide progressive. She may not go for the class-warfare rhetorical jugular with quite Warren’s gusto. But “the top 25 hedge-fund managers together make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America,” which she said this week in Iowa, is close enough for me, and a lot closer than I thought she was going to be at this stage.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 20, 2015
“A Study In Contrasts”: Take A Moment To Think About How It Is We Chose People To Be Our Political Heroes
I’m about to write something that will likely get me in hot water with a lot of my progressive friends. But in the end, if I make you pause to think, it will be worth it.
What I want to do is contrast the records of two fairly new Democratic Senators: Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. Senator Warren has 10 months of seniority on Senator Booker – but they both began their terms in 2013. Other than that, their names are rarely mentioned together.
As we’ve seen, Senator Warren has become the hero of progressives, while Senator Booker became persona non grata when he criticized Democrats and the Obama campaign for going after Romney over his connections to Bain Capital just prior to the 2012 election.
It’s interesting to note what these two have achieved in their short history in the Senate. On Warren’s web site, you can see what bills she has sponsored. There is one of note having to do with student loan refinancing. The other three appear to be symbolic in nature. Looking a bit deeper, we can see who Warren has recruited to be cosponsors on the bill related to student loans. The list is long…all Democrats. On the other issue Senator Warren is known for – going after Wall Street – she sponsored the “21st Century Glass-Steagall Act of 2013,” which was never voted out of committee and has not been re-inroduced.
Booker has made criminal justice reform his signature issue. On that front, he has cosponsored legislation called the REDEEM Act and the Smarter Sentencing Act. The former takes six steps to help those coming out of the criminal justice system be more successful in their attempts to re-intigrate back into society. The latter gives judges more leeway to deviate from mandatory minimum sentences.
Other than tackling different issues (all of which are important to progressives) the other big difference is that Booker is cosponsoring the REDEEM act with Republican Senator Rand Paul. The list of cosponsors on the Smarter Sentencing Act is nothing short of mind-blowing: Senators Mike Lee (R-UT), Dick Durban (D-IL), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
I know that many names in that group are odious to progressives. But the question is this: Who do you think is more likely to get their sponsored legislation passed in this Congress, Senator Warren or Senator Booker?
I point all this out because I’d like progressives to take a moment to think about how it is that we chose people to be our political heroes. Are they more likely to be those who master the bully pulpit to speak out strongly against our opponents? Or are they those who do the dirty job of building coalitions with people on the other side in the hopes of making life better for Americans? Does it need to be either/or?
When it comes to the political icon whose seat Elizabeth Warren now inhabits in the Senate, I think I know what he would say.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 26, 2015
“Liberals Discomfort With Power”: No Good Argument For Clinton Needing A Challenger
Even before Hillary Clinton formally announced her intention to seek the office of the presidency, left-of-center pundits had been worried about the appearance of primogenitor. While the Republicans are generally comfortable with the coronation of heirs to the party’s nomination, the Democrats are not. There’s something monarchical about political ascension, the pundits say, something authoritarian and dynastic: it’s anathema to the principles of egalitarianism and meritocracy.
After Jeb Bush announced the launch of his exploratory committee, Glenn Greenwald, the civil-libertarian journalist, said a matchup between the wife and son/brother of former presidents would “vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative value would be undeniable.”
David Corn didn’t go as far as Greenwald. But he found Clinton’s apparent inevitability equally distasteful. Corn advanced the name of former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley as a foil. O’Malley, he said, “would make a good sparring partner. He’s a smart guy with sass, but he’s not a slasher, who could inflict long-lasting political damage.” Critically important, he said, is that Clinton shouldn’t assume victory. Only with a primary fight, Clinton would “earn—not inherit—the nomination,” Corn wrote. “She’d be a fighter, not a dynastic queen. The press and the public would have something to ponder beyond just Clinton herself.”
I admire Corn and Greenwald immensely, and agree with them mostly. But I’d argue their assessments, as well as those of others in the left-liberal commentariat, are not arguments. Instead, they are statements reflecting a discomfort with power, a discomfort widely shared among Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans have no such qualms whatsoever.
Despite her flaws, Clinton and her campaign represent a singular moment in the history of the Democratic Party. Namely, there probably has not been this much party unity since 1964 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson, campaigning in the memory of an assassinated president, beat conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. But that unity failed to last. Four years later, in the shadow of Vietnam and in the backlash against the Civil Rights Act, LBJ’s Democratic Party would crack up forever.
In the wake of that crack-up, the Republicans routinely won by deploying an array of wedge issues to divide and conquer—from Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in 1968, to George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” attack in 1988, to his son’s “gays, guns, and God” in 2004. But by 2008, something essential had shifted. Barack Obama forged a coalition among minorities, young voters, and white liberals and John McCain refused to go negative on his opponent’s race, fearing backlash. In 2012, the Obama coalition held despite Mitt Romney’s clumsy attempts at race baiting.
Holding that coalition together is vital to maintaining the gains, large and small, made in eight years of unprecedented, massive, and total resistance on the part of the Republicans. And I’m not only talking about the Affordable Care Act, which is transforming life for millions, nor the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which is finally taking effect.
Since 2013, when Obama realized he’d get nothing in terms of legislation from the Republicans, the president used his executive authority to make several small-bore advances in climate change, immigration, foreign policy, gay rights, and the minimum wage (among federal contractors). All it takes to turn that around is the next Republican president.
In 2000, Ralph Nader won a few million votes by claiming there was no difference between the major parties. While his message was undeniable, his campaign was indisputably destructive. Nader’s take of the popular vote was enough for George W. Bush to beat Al Gore by a hair. In addition to a disastrous war, giveaways to the wealthy, and incompetent governance, we have Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who, along with the high Court’s Republican majority, believe money has no corrupting effect on politics and that closely held businesses may discriminate on the basis of religious liberty.
Nader isn’t responsible for the Bush era. My point is that the stakes are high—too high to worry about a candidate’s foibles and fret over a “dynastic queen.” That matters less than Clinton’s being a Democrat who will, at the very least, hold the line against attempts to redistribute more wealth upward, to dismantle the welfare state, to privatized the public sphere, and wage more war abroad. Hopefully, if Clinton wins in 2016, she will build on the progressive record started by her predecessor.
Left-liberals are right in saying Clinton must clarify her positions on immigration, Wall Street, unemployment, foreign policy, and a host of other issues. She has been and will continue to be like her husband: maddeningly circumspect and hard to pin down. But that, in addition to all the other complaints thus far, doesn’t amount to an argument against her winning the nomination. Those complaints reflect liberals’ unease with power and the use of that power to protect hard-won progressive gains.
It’s time to get over that.
After all, voting is a political strategy that hopes to achieve political ends, not a quadrennial occasion to assess a candidate’s ideological worth.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; Featured Post, The National Memo, April 21, 2015
“Where Government Excels”: Recognizing The Reality That There Are Some Things The Government Does Better Than The Private Sector
As Republican presidential hopefuls trot out their policy agendas — which always involve cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits for the poor and middle class — some real new thinking is happening on the other side of the aisle. Suddenly, it seems, many Democrats have decided to break with Beltway orthodoxy, which always calls for cuts in “entitlements.” Instead, they’re proposing that Social Security benefits actually be expanded.
This is a welcome development in two ways. First, the specific case for expanding Social Security is quite good. Second, and more fundamentally, Democrats finally seem to be standing up to antigovernment propaganda and recognizing the reality that there are some things the government does better than the private sector.
Like all advanced nations, America mainly relies on private markets and private initiatives to provide its citizens with the things they want and need, and hardly anyone in our political discourse would propose changing that. The days when it sounded like a good idea to have the government directly run large parts of the economy are long past.
Yet we also know that some things more or less must be done by government. Every economics textbooks talks about “public goods” like national defense and air traffic control that can’t be made available to anyone without being made available to everyone, and which profit-seeking firms, therefore, have no incentive to provide. But are public goods the only area where the government outperforms the private sector? By no means.
One classic example of government doing it better is health insurance. Yes, conservatives constantly agitate for more privatization — in particular, they want to convert Medicare into nothing more than vouchers for the purchase of private insurance — but all the evidence says this would move us in precisely the wrong direction. Medicare and Medicaid are substantially cheaper and more efficient than private insurance; they even involve less bureaucracy. Internationally, the American health system is unique in the extent to which it relies on the private sector, and it’s also unique in its incredible inefficiency and high costs.
And there’s another major example of government superiority: providing retirement security.
Maybe we wouldn’t need Social Security if ordinary people really were the perfectly rational, farsighted agents economists like to assume in their models (and right-wingers like to assume in their propaganda). In an idealized world, 25-year-old workers would base their decisions about how much to save on a realistic assessment of what they will need to live comfortably when they’re in their 70s. They’d also be smart and sophisticated in how they invested those savings, carefully seeking the best trade-offs between risk and return.
In the real world, however, many and arguably most working Americans are saving much too little for their retirement. They’re also investing these savings badly. For example, a recent White House report found that Americans are losing billions each year thanks to investment advisers trying to maximize their own fees rather than their clients’ welfare.
You might be tempted to say that if workers save too little and invest badly, it’s their own fault. But people have jobs and children, and they must cope with all the crises of life. It’s unfair to expect them to be expert investors, too. In any case, the economy is supposed to work for real people leading real lives; it shouldn’t be an obstacle course only a few can navigate.
And in the real world of retirement, Social Security is a shining example of a system that works. It’s simple and clean, with low operating costs and minimal bureaucracy. It provides older Americans who worked hard all their lives with a chance of living decently in retirement, without requiring that they show an inhuman ability to think decades ahead and be investment whizzes as well. The only problem is that the decline of private pensions, and their replacement with inadequate 401(k)-type plans, has left a gap that Social Security isn’t currently big enough to fill. So why not make it bigger?
Needless to say, suggestions along these lines are already provoking near-hysterical reactions, not just from the right, but from self-proclaimed centrists. As I wrote some years ago, calling for cuts to Social Security has long been seen inside the Beltway as a “badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are.” And it’s only a decade since former President George W. Bush tried to privatize the program, with a lot of centrist support.
But true seriousness means looking at what works and what doesn’t. Privatized retirement schemes work very badly; Social Security works very well. And we should build on that success.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 10, 2015
“Peace Rather Than War”: If Chuck Schumer Kills The Iran Nuclear Deal, He Should Not Be Senate Minority Leader
The framework for the Iranian nuclear deal is about as good as anyone could reasonably expect. If it were solely up to the negotiators, it would likely be finalized in June. But they are not the only players, and it’s become clear that the biggest danger to the deal are hawks in Iran and the U.S.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) is threatening action that may destroy the bargain, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is doing the same. Iran is out of the U.S.’s control — but Democrats can hold Schumer to account. If he destroys the Iran deal, he must not be allowed to become Senate minority leader, a position that was basically bequeathed to him by outgoing Minority Leader Harry Reid.
On the Iranian side, Khamenei said out of the blue this week that any deal must include the immediate lifting of all sanctions and prevent foreign inspectors from visiting military sites, two demands that could blow up the tentative framework negotiated in Lausanne, Switzerland. However, there’s good reason to believe Khamenei is positioning for domestic hardliners. The Lausanne framework provides for the lifting of a big chunk of current sanctions, while keeping others related to Iran’s support for Hezbollah. Khamenei, in other words, could squirrel out of his seemingly tough demands if he wanted.
At any rate, if Khamenei really does want to blow up the deal, there’s no stopping him. Iran will either accept the deal or it won’t. If not, it’s really Khamenei’s loss.
That brings us to Schumer. He has announced his support for a Senate bill sponsored by Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee that would require congressional approval for any final deal with Iran. Since a veto by President Obama is certain, Republicans will need Democratic support to override it. Schumer, as the Senate minority leader heir-apparent, is sending a clear signal to Democrats that betraying the president is fine, while undermining arguments that the Corker bill is a mere exercise in partisanship.
The fact that Schumer is even daring to try this is surely evidence of the continuing weakness of the Democratic Party’s anti-war faction. Even Elizabeth Warren isn’t particularly anti-war.
However, pro-war Democrats have consistently underestimated the long-term political danger behind such casual aggressiveness. Just like Cory Booker, Schumer appears to have forgotten that voting for the Iraq War is the reason Hillary Clinton is not president today.
Many good old liberals were absolutely furious with the whole Democratic establishment for voting for Bush’s war of aggression and getting something like half a million people killed for no reason. They’re not so agitated at the moment, but if Schumer shanks what may be the last best hope at a deal before President Bush III takes the nation on another jolly Middle East crusade, then he will face an enormous backlash. And it should cost him the job he covets so badly.
According to Matt Yglesias, a former Schumer intern, the senator is a “really sincere and committed Israel hawk,” and sees himself as dedicated to protecting Israel’s security. If that is his motivation, it might be possible to convince Schumer that this Iran bargain is actually in Israel’s long-term interests. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought the Iraq War would be a swell development for Israel, and it turned out to be an epic strategic disaster instead. Chances are that he’s wrong about this one, too, like he is about everything else.
But if Schumer can’t see reason, then someone else should be Senate minority leader — preferably someone who is more interested in peace than war.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 10, 2015
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