“Drop These Silly Notions Of False Equivalence”: The Democratic Party Is The Only Home For Centrists
This is a letter to political centrists.
For those of you alarmed that Rep. Eric Cantor was not conservative enough for Republicans in Virginia’s 7th congressional district, I encourage you to read Charles Wheelan’s The Centrist Manifesto
Take a read through Wheelan’s “Manifesto.” It’s a short read, published last year after it became clear that President Obama’s re-election would not bring a new age of bipartisanship to Washington. Wheelan calls for the center to step outside of the two major parties and stand up for itself. In noting that the fastest growing bloc of voters is Independents, Wheelan argues that both the Democratic and Republican parties have driven out moderates by standing only for their political bases — and that the only resolution to this is an organized movement of Independents.
Take a read, because Wheelan is wrong.
Wheelan’s vision may have made sense in 2013, but much has changed in the past year. We are now well past the time for quixotic visions of bipartisanship driven by centrists on both sides of the divide. To read “Manifesto” is to recall a time when Americans could reasonably believe that in spite of bitter partisanship in Washington, Congress could transcend the ideological gap to act on immigration reform, universal background checks, and tax reform. To behave, in short, like statesmen.
If we have learned anything from Eric Cantor’s demise, it’s that the Republican Party is no place for pragmatic centrists. It’s not even a place for relentless partisans who may stray from Republican orthodoxy on an issue or two.
So it’s time to just say it out in the open: The resolution to Washington’s dysfunction is a migration of Independents into the Democratic Party, because there is only one side that seems at all interested in welcoming centrists.
We should first note one of the most fundamental rules of political science: Duverger’s Law. This is the observation, made famous by French sociologist Maurice Duverger, that in winner-take-all two-party systems, voters inevitably gravitate toward one of two major parties. This is because voters do not want to waste their vote on a candidate who will not win. Recall how quickly liberal voters snapped back into the Democratic fold after wasting votes on Ralph Nader in 2000; they know Duverger’s Law well.
Given Duverger’s Law, it would follow that any potential “Centrist Party” would run into institutional obstacles not easily surmounted by even the most popular movement. And even those preaching the gospel of bipartisanship, nonpartisanship, and centrism must accept the reality that the current Republican Party is plainly interested in none of that.
This goes for the 501(c)(4) groups like Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. If you want Congress to move “FWD” on immigration reform, under what circumstance could you expect a GOP-led House to buck the Tea Party and pass a bill that commands broad bipartisan support?
This also goes for moderate voters, whom Wheelan notes comprised 41 percent of the electorate in 2012.
Wheelan correctly observes that any centrist party should not simply meet both sides halfway on each issue, but rather take the best ideas from both sides. A rational observer, for example, would not conclude that climate change is “probably” happening because Democrats are sure it is, and Republicans are sure it’s not.
He also correctly notes that many Democrats have strayed from sensible policies in favor of myopic political interests. But it simply cannot be said that there is no home for centrists in the Democratic Party.
In fact, several prominent Democrats — including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — are on record as supporting school choice. Congress passed free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama in 2011 with large numbers of Democratic votes, and President Obama signed them into law. The Obama administration and many of its congressional allies have supported lowering the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 28 percent.
In other words, Democrats often support centrist policies without reprisal. Such apostasy would never be tolerated in the GOP.
Wheelan examines the U.S. Senate in “Manifesto,” and proposes that if moderate members began asserting themselves as independent from their parties, the cogs of Washington may begin to turn again.
“With a mere four or five U.S. Senate seats, the Centrists can deny either traditional party a majority. At that point, the Centrists would be America’s power brokers…good things can start happening again,” Wheelan writes.
He’s right, but who might these four to five senators be? At the moment, they would almost assuredly be Democrats.
Take a look at the vote scoring of the 112th Senate (which ended after the 2012 election,) done by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. The NOMINATE scale, an abbreviation for Nominal Three-Step Estimation, is immensely complex, and explaining it is well beyond the scope of this piece. Please accept for a moment that -1 on the scale is the score of the most liberal senator imaginable, and 1 is the most conservative. Zero is the perfect middle.
You may note the slight asymmetry of the distribution. I would mark the area between -0.25 and 0.25 as centrist territory. Thirteen of these centrists were Democrats, and only five were Republicans. Of these five, only Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) remain in the 113th Senate. Murkowski, it should be noted, held on to her seat in 2010 only after a miraculous write-in campaign overruled GOP primary voters, who nominated fringe Tea Party candidate Joe Miller.
You might also note that NOMINATE scores President Obama as being as liberal as Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) was conservative. Obama commands the approval of nearly 80 percent of Democrats, while Lugar was dismissed by GOP voters in favor of a man who believed that “God’s intent” was for women to bear the children of their rapists.
A Pew Research Center poll released this week found that 82 percent of “consistently liberal” respondents said they would like elected officials to make compromises; only 14 percent said they would prefer that elected officials stick to their positions. When offered the same dichotomy, “consistently conservative” respondents said they would prefer elected officials hold fast to their views by a 63 to 32 percent margin.
This Republican intransigence left Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, two of the most prominent scholars of the Senate, to place the blame for Washington’s dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
“When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges,” Mann and Ornstein write.
Of course, we recently had two years of almost unfettered Democratic control in Washington. Was the record of the 111th Congress, which reigned in 2009 and 2010, perfect? Of course not. But it got things done, including passing a markedly centrist health care bill that has expanded coverage to more than 10 million people to date.
It got done because those four or five senators Wheelan speaks of cooperated. Those senators were all Democrats.
On the issues, I have no apparent disagreements with Wheelan. He’s a brilliant author and public policy expert.
But he, and others, has to drop these silly notions of false equivalence. I too hope for a day when Republicans in Washington are ready to rejoin mainstream political thought. But it does no good to pretend that they exist in that space now. And given the message that GOP voters just sent us from Virginia’s 7th congressional district, they aren’t coming back anytime soon.
Until the GOP is ready to return to rationality, centrists are left with no choice but to organize and vote for Democrats, and work within the Democratic Party to advance centrist goals.
By: Thomas L. Day, an Iraq War veteran and a Defense Council member of the Truman National Security Project; The National Memo, June 17, 2014
“Running Against History”: It Looks Like Scott Brown May Have Picked Exactly The Wrong State
Republican Scott Brown is not just a pretty face or the first senator to be seen around the Dirksen Senate Office Building in full biking gear for his afternoon rides. How else is he to keep his tall, lean physique in fighting form in the deliberative body? After all, the once senator from Massachusetts may be the future senator from New Hampshire.
But there’s more to that story than switching states. Brown has already earned a unique place in U.S. political history, despite a slender record of service after winning a special election to fill the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010, as he is the first man to fully face the ramifications of the rise in formidable women players running for high office in the past 20 years. The Senate now has an all-time high of 20 women. If Brown wins, he will cut into that peak, reached in 2012. Does he want to cycle against history?
Brown will likely become the only man ever to run in three consecutive Senate races against three women candidates. You read it here first. I say this despite Mark Leibovich’s wry piece in the New York Times Magazine giving Brown the sobriquet, “Superhypothetical.”
Lest we forget, he beat Martha Coakley, the state’s Democratic attorney general, when she forgot to campaign and even took a vacation shortly before the election. Then he lost to feisty Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren in 2012. And now he comes into the fray again — well, almost. Bowing to party pressure, he has formed an exploratory committee in New Hampshire, where his family has a vacation home. That means that he is taking all the right steps to challenge a popular Democrat, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, in the red-flecked Granite state.
Let’s say that Brown is, for all intents and purposes, jumping into the race this spring. That is roughly the consensus among the politerati. Republican party operatives are delirious at the thought that Brown could clinch their goal of painting the Senate red overnight. And he could, because Shaheen is not the only vulnerable Democrat in this cycle. Two Southern Democrats, Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Pryor, are in deep danger and don’t want any “help” from President Obama.
If the wily Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky becomes the Majority Leader, even by a margin of 51-49, that will effectively doom President Obama’s chances of getting any major legislation passed in his second term. Big money stands by, ready to help Brown become a powerful contender.
In fairness to him, Brown is no Ted Cruz tea partier, but a telegenic New England moderate with some appealing qualities. If Brown declares and engages, New Hampshire will be the most closely watched state on the 2014 political map. Accustomed to the drill, voters there will love the national media trudging through the leaves to take their political pulse. They are an unusually seasoned, sophisticated set of voters in a small state and the outcome is bound to be a close call. For Shaheen, a former governor, the home court advantage could prove decisive.
More interestingly, gender may help Shaheen where she lives; the state’s other senator is a Republican woman, Kelly Ayotte. In fact, the state’s congressional delegation is all female, and the governor is a woman, all of which is the stuff of history. That is hard evidence that Brown will have to pedal uphill in a state that favors electing women, lately.
For Brown, the race will break his personal tie, one way or the other, when it comes to running against women. And it sure looks like he picked exactly the wrong state.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 24, 2014
“Worsening Inequality”: 900 Rich People Won’t Pay Into Social Security For The Rest Of The Year
While almost all working Americans will pay into Social Security through their paychecks throughout the year, the 900 wealthiest people in the country won’t. That’s because the highest-earning 0.0001 percent of the U.S. — many of them corporate CEOs — made $117,000 in the first two days of the year, which is the maximum annual income that is subject to Social Security taxes under federal law.
It’s tough to say for certain who will be a part of this group in 2014, since the most recent available data on Americans’ earnings is from 2012. In that year, 894 individuals nationwide made enough to qualify for membership in this club, according to the Los Angeles Times. Economist Teresa Ghilarducci came up with the calculation, and points out that Forbes data on top earners enables analysts and the public to see some of the members of this group. There were nearly 70 corporate CEOs who made enough to qualify in 2012, including the top officers at companies like Philip Morris, NewsCorp, Starbucks, ComCast, and Pfizer.
They get to live the year free from Social Security taxes because the law says that only the first $117,000 earned in a year can be taxed to fund the retirement program that kept more than 15 million people out of poverty in 2011. Democrats have pushed to raise the cap in recent years from $106,800 in 2009 to the current level. Eliminating the cap entirely could make the program solvent for the next 75 years without cutting a dime from anyone’s benefits — and doing so wouldn’t touch the earnings of 94.2 percent of all American workers.
Despite that option, most of the debates around Social Security in recent years have focused on cutting the program rather than increasing its revenue stream. Yet Americans are facing a retirement crisis. Companies’ shifts from pensions to investment plans for retirees has undermined the financial security of working people while enriching the financial services industry and worsening inequality. For non-white workers who are far less likely to have access to even those paltry 401(k) plans, the picture is even bleaker. Overall more than half of all Americans are projected to see a steep drop in their standard of living upon retirement. There is a $6.6 trillion gap between what working Americans have saved and what they ought to have saved to retire well.
In the face of all of this, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and others have proposed increasing Social Security benefits rather than cutting them.
By: Alan Pyke, Think Progress, January 3, 2014
“The Could-Be Columns”: Why The Misogynist Media Are Trying To Create A Hillary Clinton-Elizabeth Warren-Caroline Kennedy Catfight
How terrifying is it to the political establishment that a woman might actually have a clear shot to becoming the next president?
Enough that the parlor game of the moment in Washington is to start listing the Other Women – that is, the scary females (“scary” being a function of “female” in this case) who might end up challenging Hillary Clinton in a Democratic primary. Or a Jell-o fight or mud wrestling match, to go by the absurd speculation in the media.
First, we have Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who for some reason is seen as Clinton’s dangerous threat from the left. Warren is a real rising star, to be sure, and arrived to the Senate with an already-elevated status, given her knowledge of financial regulation and consistent commitment to consumer rights and other liberal causes. She’s not showy; she’s smart and a solid workhorse –like the senator who pre-preceded her, Edward M. Kennedy. There’s nothing she has said or done to indicate she has her eye on the White House in 2016. Her former national finance chairman has told donors she is raising no cash for a 2016 run, which pretty much ends it there – you can’t run a presidential campaign without money. And Warren herself has told the Boston Globe “no, no, no no” in response to the question.
Ah, but even in politics, when a woman says no, some in the media think she means yes. We have The New Republic speculating about a possible Warren-Clinton showdown. And we have the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, always up for a woman-bashing column, talking about how a Warren presidency would be, in his mind, even worse than an Obama presidency. At least Cohen has the journalistic integrity to note parenthetically that Warren has expressed no interest in the job.
Then we have Caroline Kennedy, whom Post blogger Jennifer Rubin suggests might also be up for a run, noting Kennedy’s deft start to her new job as ambassador to Japan. That – plus the Kennedy name and experience watching family members in politics – seems to be the only justification for such random speculation. And it’s absurd on its face. Kennedy is indeed deeply committed to public service, but she is a somewhat shy person who does not enjoy being the center of attention. It’s one of the reasons she did not run for the Senate in New York. The idea that she could stomach the nonstop attention and scrutiny of a presidential run is nonsense. She is gracious and diplomatic, which makes her a perfect pick for an ambassadorship – not a presidential candidate.
So why the could-be columns? Part of it is the natural tendency in the media to find someone – anyone – to create a conflict or fight where there currently exists none. Clinton is the clear early front-runner for the Democratic nomination, should she decide to run. Vice President Joe Biden might give her a challenge, if he decides to run. But that’s not enough for the Clinton-wary, who want to diminish her potential candidacy by reducing it to some kind of brewing girlfight. Clinton with a clear path to the nomination is infuriating to this group, and a potential challenge from a man only gives credibility to her as a candidate. Ah, but present her future as one where she has to kick Warren or Kennedy with her kitten heels and scratch out their eyes to be the Democratic nominee – now that’s a storyline misogynist America finds appealing. Fortunately, the three women in question aren’t agreeing to those roles.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 3, 2013
“Taking On Too Big To Fail”: Financial Reform Is About To Catch A Second Wind And Elizabeth Warren Is Ready To Ride It
Financial reformers seeking new rules beyond the range of the Dodd-Frank law haven’t had much to cheer about this year. The chances of Congress passing new regulations—OK, passing anything—look bleak, and the Obama Administration wants to simply finish implementing the last set of reforms. But reformers are playing a longer game, biding their time until the conditions are ripe for a dam burst. That could happen sooner than you think. High-profile champions for reform are gradually bending regulators to their will, and a pile-up of big bank abuses have eroded Wall Street’s reputation in Washington. Most importantly, a new report detailing the extraordinary largesse granted banks during the financial crisis, and questioning whether Dodd-Frank would prevent a rerun, could set off a fresh spark.
An unlikely bipartisan duo, Senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter, have tried all year to focus attention in Congress on ending “too big to fail,” the perception that large financial institutions will inevitably receive government bailouts if they run into trouble. This allows banks to take on outsized risks with implicit government support, and receive a de facto subsidy, with lower borrowing costs than their smaller competitors, because investors believe a backstopped institution will always pay them back. Brown and Vitter introduced legislation earlier this year to significantly raise capital requirements, which they say will reduce reliance on bailouts by forcing banks to pay for their own losses.
Brown and Vitter commissioned a study from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to quantify the public subsidy bestowed on banks, which could give them powerful evidence to rally support for their legislation. GAO released the first part of the study last week. It mostly looks backward at the “extraordinary support” given to banks from 2007-2009 to weather the financial crisis, and whether the Dodd-Frank financial reform law ended this tendency toward bailouts. The more controversial part of the study, on how much the government subsidizes big banks considered too big to fail, isn’t due until next year.
But the report still contains some explosive material. It details how banks received trillions of dollars in capital injections, emergency lending and debt guarantees during the financial crisis, offered with more favorable terms than they could have found in the private market, and secured by junk collateral that non-government lenders would never accept. Some debt guarantees given by government agencies to banks were up to 10 percent cheaper than private alternatives, saving the banks billions of dollars. Banks with over $50 billion in assets used the crisis-era programs nearly twice as much as their smaller counterparts. Outside of the broadly available emergency programs, JPMorgan Chase received a $30 billion loan from the New York Federal Reserve (then run by Timothy Geithner) for its purchase of Bear Stearns, and both Citigroup and Bank of America received special direct assistance of $20 billion each. According to a summary released by Brown and Vitter, those three banks, the U.S.’s largest, would have been insolvent without the government support provided during the crisis. Since the biggest banks are even bigger today (the report states that the nation’s four largest banks are $2 trillion larger than they were in 2007), it’s hard to believe that similar support wouldn’t be granted if needed.
Dodd-Frank’s architects claim the law would prevent future bailouts. At least some of the market is convinced it would; the rating agency Moody’s downgraded the debt of major U.S. banks last week, after determining they would not have the advantage of future government support in a crisis (it’s worth noting that rating agencies receive the majority of their funding through the structured finance deals of these same big banks). But the GAO report concludes that Dodd-Frank “implementation is incomplete and the effectiveness of some provisions remains uncertain.”
The best example of this is the Federal Reserve’s Section 13(3) authority, a primary vehicle for emergency lending during the crisis. Dodd-Frank prevents the Federal Reserve from using section 13(3) to assist an individual institution, restricts even broad-based 13(3) programs from lending to insolvent firms, and adds other requirements and limitations. But the Fed has not written any 13(3) regulations yet, nor has it set any time frames for doing so. GAO recommended that the Fed establish a timeline for drafting 13(3) procedures, and the board accepted that recommendation.
The report comes at an interesting moment. Readers of this magazine may have heard of a certain Massachusetts senator named Elizabeth Warren. She has also taken on too big to fail, as an antecedent to her agenda of building an economy that works for ordinary Americans, rather than using them as giant wealth-extraction machines. And Warren has something Brown and Vitter don’t—a national platform, with the ability to shape and transform the national debate. She has already used this power to provoke incremental changes, mostly because regulators would rather be on her side than in her crosshairs. Nobody is better positioned to put this new set of facts from the GAO to use than the Warren wing of the Democratic Party.
To see this attitude change in real time, simply review the Senate Banking Committee confirmation hearings for Janet Yellen, nominated to take over the chair of the Federal Reserve. In 2009, Ben Bernanke sought confirmation for the same position, and when he was questioned about the Fed’s failures in financial regulation before the crisis, he vociferously defended the institution’s actions. Yellen, right in her opening statement, added financial regulation to the Fed’s core responsibilities, along with full employment and price stability—a huge shift. During questioning from Warren, Yellen agreed that the Board of Governors should reinstate regular principals meetings on financial supervision for the first time in 20 years, instead of relegating the decision-making to the staff level.
By: David Dayen, The New Republic, November 21, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 