The Republican party is torn between two factions at the moment. The first, the traditional mainstream wing of the party, which seeks generally to implement conservative, free-market solutions to major problems and shrink the size and scope of government but recognizes that there is room for accomplishing these legislative goals through compromise and that their survival relies on the public viewing their work as somewhat functional. This wing is led by the GOP's old guard, principally its Senate members. John McCain is certainly a member of this wing. I suspect John Boehner is a member of this wing as well, although he is navigating a minefield with a GOP House that is not mostly of this wing.
The hard-right members that dominate the GOP House caucus now have an entirely different agenda - win on every issue at every time at all costs. If the goal is to defund Obamacare, there is no government agency that they won't shut down, no debt that they won't default on and no measure of loss to their party that is too great in the pursuit of their goal.
So, here we sit again, on the brink of shutting down the government (October 1st) and potentially defaulting on our debt (sometime in late October, although that date could conceivably push later if the government shuts down, since expenditures will fall quickly.)
All of this poses a number of key questions about the GOP strategy. I'm not sure how many of these are real and how many are rhetorical, but I'll give it a try:
(1) If Obamacare will be so bad, why not let it happen?
The world won't end if our health insurance system is ineffective for a year. If Obamacare is the wrecking ball of a disaster that the GOP claims it will be, then the public outrage calling for its repeal will be impossible to ignore, even for Democrats. It will quickly be repealed, replaced, modified, etc. The goal will be accomplished.
But that's not what the GOP thinks. Ted Cruz thinks that if it isn't stopped prior to implementation - he has stated that once the subsidies start, they will be impossible to stop, with an American public addicted to the drug of free money from the government.
This is idiotic on multiple levels. First of all, it is estimated that only between 4% and 6% of Americans will get the subsidies. That is because most will continue to receive health care from their employers and those on Medicare and Medicaid (the second largest chunk of the population) will continue to receive benefits as before.
Second, it is a pretty direct insult to the intelligence of the American electorate. We are so stupid that we will never oppose an entitlement, even a bad one? Besides being elitist, it is historically false - welfare reform in the 1990s is a prototype for reforming entitlements. So was raising the Social Security age by 2 years.
Could the real fear be that people will either ultimately like the program or at worst feel neutrally about it?
(2) Do they really think they will win?
I grant you, the President has shown extreme ineptitude at negotiating these sorts of situations in the past. But does anyone honestly think he will agree to a defunding or a delay of his signature legislative accomplishment? Particularly when Republicans are poised to be blamed for all the ill effects of a government shutdown or a default?
So if this isn't about winning, what is it about? Why drive massive uncertainty into our economy over a battle that you will lose?
(3) How can they possibly think this is good strategy?
The GOP is sitting pretty for 2014 at the moment. President Obama has an approve-disapprove in the -10 to -12 range, which would historically imply a very poor showing for his party in the mid-terms. Republicans should be plotting their strategy to pad their House majority and to retake the Senate, both very achievable goals against this backdrop.
Instead, the GOP risks alienating the swing voters likely to vote for them out of disapproval of the President. They risk, once again, giving the Senate away to the Democrats, which makes their positioning harder.
They should be thinking about how to control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2016. Then they can repeal Obamacare without worry about causes defaults or shutdowns. Instead, they seem intent on losing ground.
There is plenty to criticize about the President's handling of matters budgetary. But House Republicans take the cake by a wide margin for irresponsibility.
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Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Is This What the Next 3 Years Will Look Like?, The Myth of the Democratic Dove
If You Ever Want a Case Study in Poor Leadership...
...figure out how to take a military intervention that had public support eight months ago and turn it into two-to-one opposition in your own party. Claim Presidential authority, then ask for permission but swear that you don't need it, then really need it and beg for it, then probably get denied it. Or try declaring a red line, then waiting to act on it, then signal the enemy that you are going to act on it, then have the military plans leaked so as to let the enemy blunt the effectiveness of such an attack, if it ever happens.
The Obama Administration's handling of the Syrian conflict is pathetic. There is an argument to be made for limited military intervention in Syria - it is clear to me from just the unclassified evidence that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against rebels, which is atrocious and demands some sort of international response. And intervention on humanitarian grounds has both the support of key allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and the potential to begin to improve our tarnished reputation in that part of the world. There are also some strong arguments against intervention - the rebels have Al Qaeda ties which could be destabilizing and against American interests were they to gain power. And nobody seems to have a great answer to the key foreign policy question that should be the first question asked of any proposed military intervention: "and then what?"
On balance, I'm inclined to oppose the intervention as presently proposed. The terms of victory are unclear as are American interests. While humanitarian intervention is laudable, it is insufficient, in my mind, to warrant intervention, unless we want to be involved in about a dozen conflicts around the world all the time. And replacing dictators who are evil but fundamentally rational with unknown leadership that may be less rational may actually be contrary to our security.
But this isn't really about my views on Syrian intervention, an issue which is a close call and over which rational, well-informed people can disagree.
It is about the President's leadership. While I have been critical of the President basically throughout his administration for not plotting political strategy nearly as well as he plots electoral strategy, his second term has brought about changes for the worse in his approach to leadership.
While many might argue that the President should have gotten more done in his first two years when he had large majorities and that he wasn't involved enough in the details of legislation, he did get some big things done. One of his first major acts was signing into law by far the largest economic stimulus in American history - Bill Clinton with similar Democratic majorities couldn't get a stimulus 1/60th the size of the ARRA passed. He also succeeded where every Democratic President since JFK had failed - in passing something close to universal health care - and it is worth noting that all of those Presidents had majorities in both houses of congress for all or part of their terms. On foreign policy, the President was decisive and consistent - a managed exit from Iraq and a surge, followed by a definitive timeline for withdrawal in Afghanistan. Sure, he flubbed a few - Gitmo is still open, after all. Cap and trade was a bust. The public option was a no go. But the President fundamentally led and got things done, under very divided circumstances.
I don't know if it is that the players have changed and the B-team is now advising him, but the Syrian conflict is a mess. A firm majority supported intervention in a poll late last year. Then the President asserted his unilateral authority to authorize a strike and spent a bunch of time explaining why he had the authority. This provoked a response from both parties in congress and public support plummeted. Then he abruptly reversed course last week and sought congressional approval, feeling sure no doubt that congress would not ultimately block action. Today, despite support from prominent mainstream GOP leaders such as John Boehner and John McCain, the resolution appears at real risk of not passing. That two thirds of Democrats are opposed to action in polling is reflective of Democrats deep suspicion about military intervention following the debacle in Iraq and the long war in Afghanistan. Many liberals seem sure to oppose the President on this one, particularly in the House. And while he may pull over some neo-con support, the neo-cons are not as strong in the GOP as they once were - for every John McCain there is a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz, libertarian non-interventionists that seem almost sure to oppose the resolution.
This all still could end well - congress may authorize the strike. Our fine military may be able to surgically damage the Syrian governments chemical weapons capabilities. This could work out like the conflict in the former Yugoslavia did, where our airstrikes allowed a dictator to be deposed and peaceful, democratic governments to take hold. But if it does, it will be in spite of Obama's approach, not because of it.
Real leadership would have involved one of two things. First, the President could have gone in alone. The War Powers Act clearly authorizes 60 days of military intervention in the absence of Congressional approval. Certainly long enough for a surgical strike. And if there was a mission beyond that point, Congress may well have agreed to extend a military action that was working.
Or the President could have gone to Congress early. He could have articulated the need to have some limited authorization of air force in the event that the executive branch could certify chemical weapons use. It might well have worked last year, when the American people were largely behind such an intervention.
The in-between and about-face approach chosen instead paints the administration and the country in an uncomfortable box and one with more negative possibilities to our standing in the world than positive ones. It is a shame. The President has over 3 years left in office - he needs to get his act together.
On a related note, many of you may have noted that I have taken an increasingly critical tone of the President as of late. This is not a part of some ideological shift on my part. I'm just calling balls and strikes as I see them. And of late, there have been a lot more strike outs than anything else.
Democratic Doves? Who?
A friend of mine repeated a familiar line that the President was bucking a history of military dovishness by proposing military action in Syria. This is common belief that is completely false.
Consider:
FDR went into World War II
Truman dropped the atom bomb and got us into Korea
Kennedy stared down nuclear war at the Bay of Pigs
LBJ got us into Vietnam
Clinton went into the former Yugoslavia and bombed weapons factories in Afghanistan
Of all the Democratic Presidents of the modern era, Jimmy Carter is the only one that you could even make a reasonable case as being a dove. In fact, prior to W. Bush, most of our major wars were started in Democratic administrations.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that the popular perception about partisan foreign policies is plainly false.
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Sunday, June 16, 2013
Is President Obama the Worst Ever on Civil Liberties?, The Demise of Blue America is Overblown
Liberals Should Stop Defending This Awful Record
I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at some level of reflex partisan defense of the Obama administration. After all, a big part of politics is supporting your team and liberal Democrats, particularly for Senators from blue states and Representatives from heavily-Democratic areas such as urban centers.
But any basic level of intellectual honesty or ideological consistency should prohibit the defense of President Obama surrounding the combined revelations over the past month that: a. The IRS targeted Tea-Party affiliated groups for extra scrutiny relative to tax-exempt status, b. The Justice Department has been snooping very broadly around the records of journalists relative to investigations surrounding leaks and c. That the NSA has been reviewing phone records of just about every American (as well as possibly search engine results and other meta-data) as part of terrorism investigations.
Taken on their own, there are arguments that could be made for each individual action. Tea Party groups ARE more likely to be political in nature than, say, a charity aimed at helping homeless children and perhaps deserves more individual scrutiny as to whether they are truly political organizations (which would not be tax exempt) or civic and charitable organizations (which would be.) Leaks surrounding national security ARE a crime and the Justice department had warrants for all of the records it examined. The government (supposedly) looked only at phone records not phone calls themselves and had warrants to do so - and by the way that program was started during the Bush administration.
But taken collectively, they paint a chilling picture of an administration with no respect for individual liberties. The past almost 12 years since the awful events of 9/11 have been a scary one for civil libertarians like myself. The flag-waving banner of "national security" has been used to trump all kinds of basic American rights in the name of security. This has led to an erosion of basic search and seizure rights, rights that should be every bit as sacred to us as the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
"I don't have anything to hide, why should I care" said a friend of mine at dinner the other day, a common sentiment among those defending the government. And if you assume that the government is acting nobly in the interest of national security and will always do so, perhaps you would be fine with that. I am not a terrorist, have no terrorist ties and would never be flagged in a terrorism investigation, right?
But what if, today, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, the governments intentions were less benevolent? Do you want the government to know that a cheating spouse has been calling his lover and be able to use that information for blackmail? Do you want the government to know that you are looking for a new job on monster.com and be able to tell your present employer? How would you like your mother to know about the porn site that you accessed a year ago?
Maybe other people are saints and would be fine with every American knowing everything that they had done. Maybe they've never cheated on their spouse, looked at porn, looked for another job or any of the many other legal activities that people don't necessarily want publicized. I'm personally not at all comfortable with the government knowing my every action and having that kind of power over me.
Ben Franklin once famously said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Could Ben Franklin have anticipated Al Qaeda terrorists? Of course not. But he lived in a pretty dangerous time too. And he understood a little bit about doing things that you don't necessarily want to make public.
So President Obama, who ran on a pro-civil liberties platform, has been an utter disappointment in both continuing and expanding the reach of government into people's private lives. Is the worst ever on civil liberties? Probably not. Pro-slavery President's such as Washington and Jefferson would have to rank lower (actually enslaving people is a lot worse than looking at their phone records.) FDR and Truman would have to rank below too (internment camps are a lot more intrusive than snooping.) But certainly W. and Obama rank near the bottom in the modern era.
What a shame. And a shame that liberals should start speaking up against.
Some of My Exes Live in New York
A popular view among economic conservatives of late has been that blue America is collapsing. Old liberal states and cities (those in the mid-west, Northeast and west coast, essentially) are failing, with population fleeing the crushing burden of taxes, regulation and runaway pension costs to seek greener pastures in the new powerhouses of red America (basically the Southeast and Texas.)
While it is an undeniable fact that no state has grown as fast as Texas in the past decade, I wanted to examine the premise that the old cities and states are dying.
Let's look at the facts.
First, my tip of the hat to conservatives...recent population growth has definitely been weighted towards bluer areas. Here are the top 10 states by population growth, along with their political alliances, over the past couple of years:
(1) North Dakota (red state)
(2) Texas (red state)
(3) Utah (red state)
(4) Colorado (swing state)
(5) Alaska (red state)
(6) Florida (swing state)
(7) Washington (blue state)
(8) Virginia (swing state)
(9) Georgia (red state)
(10) South Dakota (red state)
So, of the top 10, only 1 blue state makes the list and 3 swing states with 6 red states being among the fastest growing.
However, if I look at longer-term trends, the picture is less clear. Looking at the era since the current modern political divide basically started, basically since Reagan-Republicanism dawned, we can look at the long term trends. Using census data from 1970 to 2010, we can examine how electoral votes (which relate to proportion of population) have shifted.
From the 1970 census, the largest states and their share of the electoral vote were as follows:
(1) California - 45 votes
(2) New York - 41 votes
(3) Pennsylvania - 27 votes
(4/5) Illinois - 26 votes
Texas - 26 votes
Regionalizing things more, votes broke down like this:
New England (CT, RI, NH, VT, ME, MA) - 37 votes
Northeast Corridor (MD, PA, MD, NJ, NY, DE, DC) - 101 votes
Southeast (VA, WV, NC, SC, GA, TN, KY, FL) - 87 votes
Deep South (AL, MS, AR, LA, OK) - 40 votes
Mid-West (OH, MI, IL, IN, MO, WI, MN, IA) - 126 votes
Southwest (TX, AZ, NM, CO, UT, NV) - 50 votes
"Flyover" States (ND, SD, MT, WY, KS, NE, ID) - 30 votes
West Coast (WA, OR, CA) - 60 votes
Non-continental states (AK, HI) - 7 votes
In the 2010 census, 40 years later, here are the largest states:
(1) California - 55 votes
(2) Texas - 39 votes
(3) Florida - 29 votes
New York - 29 votes
(5) Pennsylvania - 20 votes
Illinois - 20 votes
The same regionalization produces the following split:
New England - 33 votes
Northeast Corridor - 79 votes
Southeast - 106 votes
Deep South - 36 votes
Mid-West - 101 votes
Southwest - 75 votes
"Flyover" States - 27 votes
West Coast - 74 votes
Non-continental states - 7 votes
The big gainers over that 40 year period were the Southeast (increasing from 87 to 106 votes), the Southwest (increasing from 50 to 75 electoral votes) and the West Coast (increasing from 60 to 74 votes), whereas the biggest losers were the Mid-west (from 126 to 101 votes) and the Northeast (from 101 to 79 votes.)
In aggregate, this would at least partially bear out the Republican theory of shift to more conservative states. But if that is the case, why did the most liberal region of the country actual rank among the biggest gainers, driven by California? Why did the deep south, the most conservative area, actually lose ground? And why did the Southwest post gains across the board, with more liberal states like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, gaining as much as conservative places like Utah and Texas?
The answer is that demographics shifts are more complex to explain than basic political theory would explain.
Texas has grown for a couple of basic reasons - the oil boom in Texas has created economic growth and a huge influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico has driven up its population. In fact, the illegal immigrant driver is primary in the population growth of most of the southwestern and west coast states. Texas and California share nothing in common politically or economically, except for a large influx of Mexican immigrants. Similarly, immigration from Cuba (legal in this case), is the primary driver of Florida's massive rise in population.
Other state's growth is more driven by local immigration, that is, people moving from other states. The Dakotas have been beneficiaries to the fracking boom and have drawn large populations from the rest of the country (well, large, compared to the base population for the Dakotas.)
While the Northeast and Mid-west have seen their populations rise in every census (Michigan being the exception, largely because of the fading jobs from the auto industry in Detroit), they have not been rising as fast as these other states because there has been no industry or immigration catalyst in these states (they don't share a border and their economies are more developed already and their cities more populated already.)
So while it is true that places outside of the Northeast and Mid-west are growing faster than those areas, their demise is highly overrated. New York is still the financial center of the world, home to the world's largest companies and far and away the largest city in the US.
One final point on those hoping for a political sea-change based on population growth - as populations in these states are growing, they are becoming more liberal. Virginia is now a swing-state, as are North Carolina and Florida. Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico appear to be largely in Democratic hands now. And I firmly believe that Texas will become a swing state in our lifetimes, unless Republicans massively shift their appeal to the immigrant population there.
The country always changes. In 1850, the largest US cities were New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans. These days, only New York and Philadelphia remain on that list, with Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas filling in the roster - Chicago a product of growth in the 1900s, Los Angeles a product of growth in the latter half of the 20th century and Dallas a product of growth over the past 20 years. Where the largest cities in 2050 or 2100 will be is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't bet against New York being on that list.
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I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at some level of reflex partisan defense of the Obama administration. After all, a big part of politics is supporting your team and liberal Democrats, particularly for Senators from blue states and Representatives from heavily-Democratic areas such as urban centers.
But any basic level of intellectual honesty or ideological consistency should prohibit the defense of President Obama surrounding the combined revelations over the past month that: a. The IRS targeted Tea-Party affiliated groups for extra scrutiny relative to tax-exempt status, b. The Justice Department has been snooping very broadly around the records of journalists relative to investigations surrounding leaks and c. That the NSA has been reviewing phone records of just about every American (as well as possibly search engine results and other meta-data) as part of terrorism investigations.
Taken on their own, there are arguments that could be made for each individual action. Tea Party groups ARE more likely to be political in nature than, say, a charity aimed at helping homeless children and perhaps deserves more individual scrutiny as to whether they are truly political organizations (which would not be tax exempt) or civic and charitable organizations (which would be.) Leaks surrounding national security ARE a crime and the Justice department had warrants for all of the records it examined. The government (supposedly) looked only at phone records not phone calls themselves and had warrants to do so - and by the way that program was started during the Bush administration.
But taken collectively, they paint a chilling picture of an administration with no respect for individual liberties. The past almost 12 years since the awful events of 9/11 have been a scary one for civil libertarians like myself. The flag-waving banner of "national security" has been used to trump all kinds of basic American rights in the name of security. This has led to an erosion of basic search and seizure rights, rights that should be every bit as sacred to us as the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
"I don't have anything to hide, why should I care" said a friend of mine at dinner the other day, a common sentiment among those defending the government. And if you assume that the government is acting nobly in the interest of national security and will always do so, perhaps you would be fine with that. I am not a terrorist, have no terrorist ties and would never be flagged in a terrorism investigation, right?
But what if, today, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, the governments intentions were less benevolent? Do you want the government to know that a cheating spouse has been calling his lover and be able to use that information for blackmail? Do you want the government to know that you are looking for a new job on monster.com and be able to tell your present employer? How would you like your mother to know about the porn site that you accessed a year ago?
Maybe other people are saints and would be fine with every American knowing everything that they had done. Maybe they've never cheated on their spouse, looked at porn, looked for another job or any of the many other legal activities that people don't necessarily want publicized. I'm personally not at all comfortable with the government knowing my every action and having that kind of power over me.
Ben Franklin once famously said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Could Ben Franklin have anticipated Al Qaeda terrorists? Of course not. But he lived in a pretty dangerous time too. And he understood a little bit about doing things that you don't necessarily want to make public.
So President Obama, who ran on a pro-civil liberties platform, has been an utter disappointment in both continuing and expanding the reach of government into people's private lives. Is the worst ever on civil liberties? Probably not. Pro-slavery President's such as Washington and Jefferson would have to rank lower (actually enslaving people is a lot worse than looking at their phone records.) FDR and Truman would have to rank below too (internment camps are a lot more intrusive than snooping.) But certainly W. and Obama rank near the bottom in the modern era.
What a shame. And a shame that liberals should start speaking up against.
Some of My Exes Live in New York
A popular view among economic conservatives of late has been that blue America is collapsing. Old liberal states and cities (those in the mid-west, Northeast and west coast, essentially) are failing, with population fleeing the crushing burden of taxes, regulation and runaway pension costs to seek greener pastures in the new powerhouses of red America (basically the Southeast and Texas.)
While it is an undeniable fact that no state has grown as fast as Texas in the past decade, I wanted to examine the premise that the old cities and states are dying.
Let's look at the facts.
First, my tip of the hat to conservatives...recent population growth has definitely been weighted towards bluer areas. Here are the top 10 states by population growth, along with their political alliances, over the past couple of years:
(1) North Dakota (red state)
(2) Texas (red state)
(3) Utah (red state)
(4) Colorado (swing state)
(5) Alaska (red state)
(6) Florida (swing state)
(7) Washington (blue state)
(8) Virginia (swing state)
(9) Georgia (red state)
(10) South Dakota (red state)
So, of the top 10, only 1 blue state makes the list and 3 swing states with 6 red states being among the fastest growing.
However, if I look at longer-term trends, the picture is less clear. Looking at the era since the current modern political divide basically started, basically since Reagan-Republicanism dawned, we can look at the long term trends. Using census data from 1970 to 2010, we can examine how electoral votes (which relate to proportion of population) have shifted.
From the 1970 census, the largest states and their share of the electoral vote were as follows:
(1) California - 45 votes
(2) New York - 41 votes
(3) Pennsylvania - 27 votes
(4/5) Illinois - 26 votes
Texas - 26 votes
Regionalizing things more, votes broke down like this:
New England (CT, RI, NH, VT, ME, MA) - 37 votes
Northeast Corridor (MD, PA, MD, NJ, NY, DE, DC) - 101 votes
Southeast (VA, WV, NC, SC, GA, TN, KY, FL) - 87 votes
Deep South (AL, MS, AR, LA, OK) - 40 votes
Mid-West (OH, MI, IL, IN, MO, WI, MN, IA) - 126 votes
Southwest (TX, AZ, NM, CO, UT, NV) - 50 votes
"Flyover" States (ND, SD, MT, WY, KS, NE, ID) - 30 votes
West Coast (WA, OR, CA) - 60 votes
Non-continental states (AK, HI) - 7 votes
In the 2010 census, 40 years later, here are the largest states:
(1) California - 55 votes
(2) Texas - 39 votes
(3) Florida - 29 votes
New York - 29 votes
(5) Pennsylvania - 20 votes
Illinois - 20 votes
The same regionalization produces the following split:
New England - 33 votes
Northeast Corridor - 79 votes
Southeast - 106 votes
Deep South - 36 votes
Mid-West - 101 votes
Southwest - 75 votes
"Flyover" States - 27 votes
West Coast - 74 votes
Non-continental states - 7 votes
The big gainers over that 40 year period were the Southeast (increasing from 87 to 106 votes), the Southwest (increasing from 50 to 75 electoral votes) and the West Coast (increasing from 60 to 74 votes), whereas the biggest losers were the Mid-west (from 126 to 101 votes) and the Northeast (from 101 to 79 votes.)
In aggregate, this would at least partially bear out the Republican theory of shift to more conservative states. But if that is the case, why did the most liberal region of the country actual rank among the biggest gainers, driven by California? Why did the deep south, the most conservative area, actually lose ground? And why did the Southwest post gains across the board, with more liberal states like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, gaining as much as conservative places like Utah and Texas?
The answer is that demographics shifts are more complex to explain than basic political theory would explain.
Texas has grown for a couple of basic reasons - the oil boom in Texas has created economic growth and a huge influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico has driven up its population. In fact, the illegal immigrant driver is primary in the population growth of most of the southwestern and west coast states. Texas and California share nothing in common politically or economically, except for a large influx of Mexican immigrants. Similarly, immigration from Cuba (legal in this case), is the primary driver of Florida's massive rise in population.
Other state's growth is more driven by local immigration, that is, people moving from other states. The Dakotas have been beneficiaries to the fracking boom and have drawn large populations from the rest of the country (well, large, compared to the base population for the Dakotas.)
While the Northeast and Mid-west have seen their populations rise in every census (Michigan being the exception, largely because of the fading jobs from the auto industry in Detroit), they have not been rising as fast as these other states because there has been no industry or immigration catalyst in these states (they don't share a border and their economies are more developed already and their cities more populated already.)
So while it is true that places outside of the Northeast and Mid-west are growing faster than those areas, their demise is highly overrated. New York is still the financial center of the world, home to the world's largest companies and far and away the largest city in the US.
One final point on those hoping for a political sea-change based on population growth - as populations in these states are growing, they are becoming more liberal. Virginia is now a swing-state, as are North Carolina and Florida. Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico appear to be largely in Democratic hands now. And I firmly believe that Texas will become a swing state in our lifetimes, unless Republicans massively shift their appeal to the immigrant population there.
The country always changes. In 1850, the largest US cities were New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans. These days, only New York and Philadelphia remain on that list, with Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas filling in the roster - Chicago a product of growth in the 1900s, Los Angeles a product of growth in the latter half of the 20th century and Dallas a product of growth over the past 20 years. Where the largest cities in 2050 or 2100 will be is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't bet against New York being on that list.
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Sunday, March 31, 2013
The Most Liberal Ever?, Why SCOTUS Should Strike Down DOMA But Uphold Prop 8
A Moderate By Any Other Name...
A conservative friend of mine, whose intellectual capabilities I respect greatly, was discussing potential 2016 nominees with me this week.
We started by debating the GOP potentials. I was partial to candidates who had done actual governing, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie. He is not a Christie fan, feeling Christie is too moderate for his liking. He does like Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels but was also bullish on Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, the former of which I think would be an utter disaster as a Presidential candidate (in spite of my respect for his recent principled stands) and the later of which I think is highly unproven as a leader.
Our discussion then turned to the Democratic side of the aisle. We quickly agreed that if Hillary Clinton chooses to run, the nomination is hers to lose. The more interesting scenario was if Hillary didn't decide to run in which case the field is fairly open to guys like Andrew Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, Joe Biden or even a dark horse like Kirsten Gillebrand. I stated that I didn't see Biden as Presidential timber and that my concern with Cuomo and in particular O'Malley was that they were too liberal for a mainstream candidacy.
It is then that this thoughtful thinker said something that I think is absolutely astounding. He stated "well, Obama got elected and it isn't like it is possible for someone to be more liberal than him."
This is a popular talking point in GOP circles, that President Obama is on an extreme liberal edge and is essentially a socialist or even less flattering terms like a "statist". The amazing thing to me is that smart people actually believe that.
Sure President Obama did some things that are on the left hand side of the American political ledger. He oversaw a stimulus package that received only 3 Republican votes. He pushed for a universal healthcare plan that was universally opposed by Republicans. And he sought higher tax rates on high income individuals.
But, let's be real. The stimulus plan was supported by every Democrat in the Senate and by three Republicans, including non-socialists Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. While it may have been a left-of-center solution, it was hardly outside of the mainstream of American politics. Liberals like Paul Krugman were aghast at how small the stimulus package was.
His health care plan, while opposed by the GOP and some conservative Democrats was far, far, short of the level of state involvement in health care in every other first world nation. It was well short of single-payer solutions sought by liberals and was, in essence a plan architected by Republicans such as Bob Dole and Mitt Romney just a few years earlier. Hardly the "most liberal" health care proposal ever.
On foreign policy, President Obama has essentially continued most of the policies of the Bush administration. He sent more troops to Afghanistan, upped drone strikes, extended the Patriot Act and kept Gitmo open. Hardly a liberal at all.
On social issues, President Obama has not sought federal funding for abortions, has only recently come out in favor of gay marriage (after a majority of the public already supported that view) and has only in his second term even spoken of gun control.
He has appointed an ex-Goldman Treasury Secretary, 2 Republican Secretaries of Defense and a Republican Secretary of Transportation.
Certainly President Obama is left of the Republicans who would run for the Presidency. But he is more George Herbert Walker Bush than Karl Marx. He didn't institute price controls like President Nixon (who also supported single-payer healthcare, incidentally.) The tax rates he proposed were a full 50% lower than the top right under Dwight Eisenhower and his tax increases were proportionally a fraction of those signed by Herbert Walker Bush.
The most liberal ever? Heck, he's hardly more liberal than half the US population.
The Right Way to Do Gay Marriage
Public opinion on gay marriage has turned. 9 states have gay marriage laws, with many others sure to follow in the next few years. Advocates for gay marriage are hopeful that the Supreme Court this summer will strike down Proposition 8 in California as well as the Defense of Marriage Act and clear the way for gay marriage nationally.
I support striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. The full faith and credit clause in Article IV, Section I of the US Constitution is very clear:
"Full faith and credit ought to be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings, of every other state; and the legislature shall, by general laws, prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings, shall be proved, and the effect which judgments, obtained in one state, shall have in another."
The meaning of this to me is clear - states must honor marriages granted in another. The Defense of Marriage Act relegated gay marriage to a status where someone can be married in one state, but become unmarried when they cross state lines. This is unprecedented in US laws - states that marry cousins must have their marriages honored by other states as do states that allow 13-year-olds to wed. The reason for the full faith and credit clause is very simple - if contracts are allowed to be broken when one crosses state lines then contracts cease to have meaning. The Supreme Court would be well justified in striking down DOMA.
Prop 8 is another issue. By striking down Prop 8, the court would need to find that prohibiting gay marriage violates the equal protection clause of the constitution. To do so would be to usurp the Democratic process and substitute their judgement for that of voters and elected officials. While I favor gay marriage, it seems both unnecessary and unwise to supplant the Democratic process. Public opinion has made gay marriage inevitable. Interpreting the equal protection clause as requiring gay marriage would be to instill in it a meaning that was clearly never intended by those who wrote the 14th amendment.
Public acceptance of gay marriage will be stronger with a full public debate. And striking down DOMA alone would ensure that gay people have a place to go to get married in a way that will be recognized.
Sometimes how you get to an outcome is as important as the outcome itself. I feel this is the case with gay marriage.
A conservative friend of mine, whose intellectual capabilities I respect greatly, was discussing potential 2016 nominees with me this week.
We started by debating the GOP potentials. I was partial to candidates who had done actual governing, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie. He is not a Christie fan, feeling Christie is too moderate for his liking. He does like Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels but was also bullish on Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, the former of which I think would be an utter disaster as a Presidential candidate (in spite of my respect for his recent principled stands) and the later of which I think is highly unproven as a leader.
Our discussion then turned to the Democratic side of the aisle. We quickly agreed that if Hillary Clinton chooses to run, the nomination is hers to lose. The more interesting scenario was if Hillary didn't decide to run in which case the field is fairly open to guys like Andrew Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, Joe Biden or even a dark horse like Kirsten Gillebrand. I stated that I didn't see Biden as Presidential timber and that my concern with Cuomo and in particular O'Malley was that they were too liberal for a mainstream candidacy.
It is then that this thoughtful thinker said something that I think is absolutely astounding. He stated "well, Obama got elected and it isn't like it is possible for someone to be more liberal than him."
This is a popular talking point in GOP circles, that President Obama is on an extreme liberal edge and is essentially a socialist or even less flattering terms like a "statist". The amazing thing to me is that smart people actually believe that.
Sure President Obama did some things that are on the left hand side of the American political ledger. He oversaw a stimulus package that received only 3 Republican votes. He pushed for a universal healthcare plan that was universally opposed by Republicans. And he sought higher tax rates on high income individuals.
But, let's be real. The stimulus plan was supported by every Democrat in the Senate and by three Republicans, including non-socialists Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. While it may have been a left-of-center solution, it was hardly outside of the mainstream of American politics. Liberals like Paul Krugman were aghast at how small the stimulus package was.
His health care plan, while opposed by the GOP and some conservative Democrats was far, far, short of the level of state involvement in health care in every other first world nation. It was well short of single-payer solutions sought by liberals and was, in essence a plan architected by Republicans such as Bob Dole and Mitt Romney just a few years earlier. Hardly the "most liberal" health care proposal ever.
On foreign policy, President Obama has essentially continued most of the policies of the Bush administration. He sent more troops to Afghanistan, upped drone strikes, extended the Patriot Act and kept Gitmo open. Hardly a liberal at all.
On social issues, President Obama has not sought federal funding for abortions, has only recently come out in favor of gay marriage (after a majority of the public already supported that view) and has only in his second term even spoken of gun control.
He has appointed an ex-Goldman Treasury Secretary, 2 Republican Secretaries of Defense and a Republican Secretary of Transportation.
Certainly President Obama is left of the Republicans who would run for the Presidency. But he is more George Herbert Walker Bush than Karl Marx. He didn't institute price controls like President Nixon (who also supported single-payer healthcare, incidentally.) The tax rates he proposed were a full 50% lower than the top right under Dwight Eisenhower and his tax increases were proportionally a fraction of those signed by Herbert Walker Bush.
The most liberal ever? Heck, he's hardly more liberal than half the US population.
The Right Way to Do Gay Marriage
Public opinion on gay marriage has turned. 9 states have gay marriage laws, with many others sure to follow in the next few years. Advocates for gay marriage are hopeful that the Supreme Court this summer will strike down Proposition 8 in California as well as the Defense of Marriage Act and clear the way for gay marriage nationally.
I support striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. The full faith and credit clause in Article IV, Section I of the US Constitution is very clear:
"Full faith and credit ought to be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings, of every other state; and the legislature shall, by general laws, prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings, shall be proved, and the effect which judgments, obtained in one state, shall have in another."
The meaning of this to me is clear - states must honor marriages granted in another. The Defense of Marriage Act relegated gay marriage to a status where someone can be married in one state, but become unmarried when they cross state lines. This is unprecedented in US laws - states that marry cousins must have their marriages honored by other states as do states that allow 13-year-olds to wed. The reason for the full faith and credit clause is very simple - if contracts are allowed to be broken when one crosses state lines then contracts cease to have meaning. The Supreme Court would be well justified in striking down DOMA.
Prop 8 is another issue. By striking down Prop 8, the court would need to find that prohibiting gay marriage violates the equal protection clause of the constitution. To do so would be to usurp the Democratic process and substitute their judgement for that of voters and elected officials. While I favor gay marriage, it seems both unnecessary and unwise to supplant the Democratic process. Public opinion has made gay marriage inevitable. Interpreting the equal protection clause as requiring gay marriage would be to instill in it a meaning that was clearly never intended by those who wrote the 14th amendment.
Public acceptance of gay marriage will be stronger with a full public debate. And striking down DOMA alone would ensure that gay people have a place to go to get married in a way that will be recognized.
Sometimes how you get to an outcome is as important as the outcome itself. I feel this is the case with gay marriage.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Why Rand Paul is Right and Obama, McCain and Graham are Wrong
Something different happened this week. In a Senate where true filibusters had long been replaced by the mere threat of filibuster - where Senators no longer stand and talk to stall a bill but simply vote against a "cloture motion", Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went old school.
Incensed by the implication by Attorney General Eric Holder's implication that while the US had never used a drone strike against a US citizen on US soil, that the executie branch might have the right to do so, Paul took to the Senate floor for over 12 hours.
Paul's filibuster was impressive on multiple levels:
(1) He Actually Filibustered - rather than hiding behind procedural rules, Paul took to the floor to make his point and left no lack of clarity about what he was doing and why.
(2) He Filibustered Something Relevant - filibustering the CIA director nomination on the basis of what the CIA director might actually order is a pertinent filibuster. Paul did not filibuster some unrelated nomination, he filibustered a nominee until it was clear what that nominee could or could not do in office.
(3) He Was Dead Right - the notion that without charge or trial that the US government could even conceive of killing an American on American soil should outrage each and every US citizen. Liberals were all too proud to protest during the Bush administration when the government encroached on civil liberties, but have been silent as the Obama administration has continued many of the same policies - or even worse in this case. On the left, only Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) showed up to support Paul's cause. Good for Senator Wyden - and shame on the rest of the Democrats in the Senate.
(4) He Got His Way - Paul's filibuster was successful. Attorney General Holder clarified, in no uncertain terms, that the executive does NOT have the authority to kill Americans on American soil. Paul won a meaningful victory for American civil liberties.
(5) He Was True to His Word - Paul stated that he was filibustering the Brennan nomination to ensure that Americans would not be killed on American soil - once he was assured, he not only voted to invoke cloture, he also voted for the nominee. There was nothing below board or disingenuous about what Paul did - he stated a clear principle (that we all should support) and didn't move the goal posts when he got what he wanted.
I am astounded that Holder or any Obama administration official ever implied the right to kill Americans without review in the first place. He was dead wrong and I feel better now that he has admitted as much.
I am even more astounded at the sniping by John McCain and Lindsey Graham at Senator Paul for his filibuster. In a year where John McCain promised not to filibuster, then filibustered the nomination of Chuck Hagel, a man he once named as a probable Secretary of Defense in a McCain administration, McCain has no moral high ground. This is the same McCain who said we couldn't afford the Bush tax cuts, then turned around and hurled mud at President Obama for supporting a very modest partial repeal of those cuts. In the realm of respectful politics, what Rand Paul did is far ahead of what John McCain has done of late.
Rand Paul captured the spirit of liberty, the very spirit that I have previously written is the key to the Republicans not being relegated to a minority party for the next 50 years. Republican leaders would be wise to pay attention and learn from what happened this week, not shove it to the side as childishness.
Rand Paul is to be commended for his actions this week. I certainly don't agree with a lot of his views, but this was a classy, principled defense of our rights. We all owe Senator Paul a debt of gratitude.
Incensed by the implication by Attorney General Eric Holder's implication that while the US had never used a drone strike against a US citizen on US soil, that the executie branch might have the right to do so, Paul took to the Senate floor for over 12 hours.
Paul's filibuster was impressive on multiple levels:
(1) He Actually Filibustered - rather than hiding behind procedural rules, Paul took to the floor to make his point and left no lack of clarity about what he was doing and why.
(2) He Filibustered Something Relevant - filibustering the CIA director nomination on the basis of what the CIA director might actually order is a pertinent filibuster. Paul did not filibuster some unrelated nomination, he filibustered a nominee until it was clear what that nominee could or could not do in office.
(3) He Was Dead Right - the notion that without charge or trial that the US government could even conceive of killing an American on American soil should outrage each and every US citizen. Liberals were all too proud to protest during the Bush administration when the government encroached on civil liberties, but have been silent as the Obama administration has continued many of the same policies - or even worse in this case. On the left, only Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) showed up to support Paul's cause. Good for Senator Wyden - and shame on the rest of the Democrats in the Senate.
(4) He Got His Way - Paul's filibuster was successful. Attorney General Holder clarified, in no uncertain terms, that the executive does NOT have the authority to kill Americans on American soil. Paul won a meaningful victory for American civil liberties.
(5) He Was True to His Word - Paul stated that he was filibustering the Brennan nomination to ensure that Americans would not be killed on American soil - once he was assured, he not only voted to invoke cloture, he also voted for the nominee. There was nothing below board or disingenuous about what Paul did - he stated a clear principle (that we all should support) and didn't move the goal posts when he got what he wanted.
I am astounded that Holder or any Obama administration official ever implied the right to kill Americans without review in the first place. He was dead wrong and I feel better now that he has admitted as much.
I am even more astounded at the sniping by John McCain and Lindsey Graham at Senator Paul for his filibuster. In a year where John McCain promised not to filibuster, then filibustered the nomination of Chuck Hagel, a man he once named as a probable Secretary of Defense in a McCain administration, McCain has no moral high ground. This is the same McCain who said we couldn't afford the Bush tax cuts, then turned around and hurled mud at President Obama for supporting a very modest partial repeal of those cuts. In the realm of respectful politics, what Rand Paul did is far ahead of what John McCain has done of late.
Rand Paul captured the spirit of liberty, the very spirit that I have previously written is the key to the Republicans not being relegated to a minority party for the next 50 years. Republican leaders would be wise to pay attention and learn from what happened this week, not shove it to the side as childishness.
Rand Paul is to be commended for his actions this week. I certainly don't agree with a lot of his views, but this was a classy, principled defense of our rights. We all owe Senator Paul a debt of gratitude.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Is Sanity Returning to the GOP?, Taking Stock of Obama's First Term
GOP Offers Debt Ceiling Sanity....for a few months
Coming out of the House GOP retreat, where they are presumably discussing their strategy and vision for the next 2 years and specifically how they are going to hold on to the House in 2014, comes word that the GOP will offer up a more or less "clean" increase of the debt ceiling to ward off default.
It comes with a few strings attached. The extension would only be for 3 months, meaning that we would be having the same discussion again in May or June. It would require both houses of Congress to pass a budget by April 15th or forfeit pay, something that the Senate has not done in several years, a fact that has been a talking point for the GOP.
It is possible that President Obama and the Democrats will have some issue with the proposal. The 3 month extension falls far short of the kind of extension or even elimination of the debt ceiling that the President had sought, hoping to avert having to deal with debt ceiling issue again in his Presidency. And Senate Democrats might balk at needing to pass a budget resolution.
But it seems like a savvy move for the GOP. It would be a tough sell for Democrats to vote against the debt ceiling increase they asked for. And I don't know very many people who would be too concerned about the possibility of Representatives and Senators not getting paid for a little while.
1 Term Down, 1 To Go
President Obama's will celebrate his second inauguration on Monday. It will be a more subdued ceremony than the celebration four years ago, when the country was less divided and we hadn't endured such a long economic malaise. But it will be a unifying moment for supporters of the President and a day of patriotism for all.
While the inauguration is on Monday, the official start of the President's second term is at noon tomorrow, as dictated by the constitution and the President will privately retake the oath of office then, before going through the ceremony on Monday.
Being at the end of the President's first 4 years, I thought it would be a good time to take stock of how the President has done.
(1) Did He Keep His Promises?
Politifact.com (run by the Tampa Bay Times) has did a great job of tracking all of the promises that the President made in the 2008 campaign and how they have turned out.
There were 508 documented promises made and of those, 239 were fully kept, 130 were partially kept and 139 were not kept. Those not kept were not kept for a variety of reasons - either the President changing his position (closing Gitmo, for instance), simply not pursuing something he promised to do (giving a State of the World address, for instance) or his desired policies changing as a result of negotiation with Congress (extending the Bush tax cuts for upper income limits for instance.)
Giving the President 100% for promises fully kept and 50% for those partially kept, the President gets 304 points out of a possible 508 or a score of 60%.
I said at the beginning of his term that it would be an A-worthy performance if the President could do half of the things he promised to do in 2008. A score of 60% certainly qualifies.
Grade: A
(2) Did He Achieve His Major Policy Goals?
The President had articulated six clear policy goals for his first term at the outset:
a. Implement a meaningful stimulus
On this issue, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act achieved almost all of what the President set out to achieve. It provided aid to states, funds for infrastructure improvements and targeted tax cuts. Couple this with the (just expired) temporary Social Security tax rate reductions that the President was able to get in 2010 and you have to say the President basically implemented what he set out to implement. There is much debate on the effectiveness of those policies, but here we are grading whether he did what he set out to do.
Grade: A
b. Implement Health Care Reform That Achieves Universal Coverage
The coverage is not quite universal (2% are excluded), the plan doesn't contain a public option, it does contain a mandate (something he opposed on the campaign trail) and the President gave up very early on including abortion coverage in the plan (another thing he campaigned on.) Still, President Obama was successful where Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Clinton failed (President Reagan and both Presidents Bush were not advocates for such a program.) The carefully negotiated program was passed through congress narrowly and was narrowly upheld as largely constitutional by the Supreme Court. It is the law of the land and will roll out over his second term. We will all get to see how successful it is or isn't.
Grade: B+
c. Repeal the Bush Tax Cuts for Those Making Over $250K
The President completely punted on this once, agreeing to a 2-year extension in late 2010, in exchange for some other goodies, such as the Social Security Tax deal. The President did better recently, at the end of his term, cutting a deal that let the rates rise on individuals making over $400K and couples making over $450K, about half of the population the President was targeting to contribute more.
Grade: C
d. Pass Meaningful Legislation to Deal with Carbon Emissions
A Cap and Trade bill passed the House in 2009 but was never even taken up in the Senate and there has been virtually no leadership from the President on making this stated priority happen. There were smaller steps that did happen, such as tax credits for energy efficient homes and appliances and extensions of wind and solar subsidies. But all-in-all, the President hasn't made much progress here.
Grade: D+
e. Provide for Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Perhaps it will be a second term issue. But the President never even proposed a package of immigration reform, something which he had stated he would do in his first year in office. He took some action by executive order, such as the regulatory version of the Dream Act, but these actions were taken very late in his term and fall far short of comprehensive reform.
Grade: D
f. End the War in Iraq and Provide Additional Troops, on a Timetable in Afghanistan
The President basically did everything he said he would here. We are out of Iraq. We did surge in Afghanistan, but are now winding down our involvement, in line with the time table the President set.
Grade: A
Overall Grade on Priorities: B-
(3) How Did We Fare Economically?
This is a quite complicated question, given the deep recession that was underway at the start of his term. By some economic measures, the President doesn't make the grade, by others he does.
Average Annual GDP Growth During His Term: 2.1% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 3.8%)
Average Unemployment Rate During His Term: 9.0% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 6.0%)
Stock Market Return During His Term: 12.1% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 9.9%)
By the standards of economic growth and unemployment, the last 4 years have not been among our better ones. Following a deep recession, we have had slow growth with sustained high unemployment over several years. While unemployment is now falling, it is doing so painfully slowly and at least in part due to less people in the workforce. By these measures, President Obama doesn't rate well.
However, putting those numbers in proper context is difficult since anyone could have predicted following the financial crisis that unemployment would be elevated and growth depressed, at least for a period of time. This is where the stock market return comes in. The stock market price reflects both present economic circumstances and expectations around future economic performance. On this measure, the President is doing great, far exceeding normal market returns and, given that those are nominal returns and inflation has been very low, real returns exceed by an even greater margin.
Of course, stock market expectations can be wrong. The stock market was wildly over-priced in 1999 and wildly under priced in 1982. So while some of change in expectations can be due to averting crises or sounder policies, some is also due to mean reversion or, in common language, irrational panic or optimism abating.
So, it is difficult as we stand here today to judge the President's economic performance. We didn't fall off a cliff and into a depression, something that seemed like a real possibility in 2008. But we also haven't had a "V-shaped recovery" where the economy grows quickly after purging the less efficient elements in a recession. It is a mixed bag.
Grade; C
The President has a lot to tackle in his second term. The deficit is still out-of-control, with no path to balance in sight. Immigration and climate change remain unsolved issues. The economy, while not in crisis, is certainly not healthy, particularly for the lower-middle class.
I wish him luck as he begins his second term, for all our sakes.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Coming out of the House GOP retreat, where they are presumably discussing their strategy and vision for the next 2 years and specifically how they are going to hold on to the House in 2014, comes word that the GOP will offer up a more or less "clean" increase of the debt ceiling to ward off default.
It comes with a few strings attached. The extension would only be for 3 months, meaning that we would be having the same discussion again in May or June. It would require both houses of Congress to pass a budget by April 15th or forfeit pay, something that the Senate has not done in several years, a fact that has been a talking point for the GOP.
It is possible that President Obama and the Democrats will have some issue with the proposal. The 3 month extension falls far short of the kind of extension or even elimination of the debt ceiling that the President had sought, hoping to avert having to deal with debt ceiling issue again in his Presidency. And Senate Democrats might balk at needing to pass a budget resolution.
But it seems like a savvy move for the GOP. It would be a tough sell for Democrats to vote against the debt ceiling increase they asked for. And I don't know very many people who would be too concerned about the possibility of Representatives and Senators not getting paid for a little while.
1 Term Down, 1 To Go
President Obama's will celebrate his second inauguration on Monday. It will be a more subdued ceremony than the celebration four years ago, when the country was less divided and we hadn't endured such a long economic malaise. But it will be a unifying moment for supporters of the President and a day of patriotism for all.
While the inauguration is on Monday, the official start of the President's second term is at noon tomorrow, as dictated by the constitution and the President will privately retake the oath of office then, before going through the ceremony on Monday.
Being at the end of the President's first 4 years, I thought it would be a good time to take stock of how the President has done.
(1) Did He Keep His Promises?
Politifact.com (run by the Tampa Bay Times) has did a great job of tracking all of the promises that the President made in the 2008 campaign and how they have turned out.
There were 508 documented promises made and of those, 239 were fully kept, 130 were partially kept and 139 were not kept. Those not kept were not kept for a variety of reasons - either the President changing his position (closing Gitmo, for instance), simply not pursuing something he promised to do (giving a State of the World address, for instance) or his desired policies changing as a result of negotiation with Congress (extending the Bush tax cuts for upper income limits for instance.)
Giving the President 100% for promises fully kept and 50% for those partially kept, the President gets 304 points out of a possible 508 or a score of 60%.
I said at the beginning of his term that it would be an A-worthy performance if the President could do half of the things he promised to do in 2008. A score of 60% certainly qualifies.
Grade: A
(2) Did He Achieve His Major Policy Goals?
The President had articulated six clear policy goals for his first term at the outset:
a. Implement a meaningful stimulus
On this issue, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act achieved almost all of what the President set out to achieve. It provided aid to states, funds for infrastructure improvements and targeted tax cuts. Couple this with the (just expired) temporary Social Security tax rate reductions that the President was able to get in 2010 and you have to say the President basically implemented what he set out to implement. There is much debate on the effectiveness of those policies, but here we are grading whether he did what he set out to do.
Grade: A
b. Implement Health Care Reform That Achieves Universal Coverage
The coverage is not quite universal (2% are excluded), the plan doesn't contain a public option, it does contain a mandate (something he opposed on the campaign trail) and the President gave up very early on including abortion coverage in the plan (another thing he campaigned on.) Still, President Obama was successful where Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Clinton failed (President Reagan and both Presidents Bush were not advocates for such a program.) The carefully negotiated program was passed through congress narrowly and was narrowly upheld as largely constitutional by the Supreme Court. It is the law of the land and will roll out over his second term. We will all get to see how successful it is or isn't.
Grade: B+
c. Repeal the Bush Tax Cuts for Those Making Over $250K
The President completely punted on this once, agreeing to a 2-year extension in late 2010, in exchange for some other goodies, such as the Social Security Tax deal. The President did better recently, at the end of his term, cutting a deal that let the rates rise on individuals making over $400K and couples making over $450K, about half of the population the President was targeting to contribute more.
Grade: C
d. Pass Meaningful Legislation to Deal with Carbon Emissions
A Cap and Trade bill passed the House in 2009 but was never even taken up in the Senate and there has been virtually no leadership from the President on making this stated priority happen. There were smaller steps that did happen, such as tax credits for energy efficient homes and appliances and extensions of wind and solar subsidies. But all-in-all, the President hasn't made much progress here.
Grade: D+
e. Provide for Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Perhaps it will be a second term issue. But the President never even proposed a package of immigration reform, something which he had stated he would do in his first year in office. He took some action by executive order, such as the regulatory version of the Dream Act, but these actions were taken very late in his term and fall far short of comprehensive reform.
Grade: D
f. End the War in Iraq and Provide Additional Troops, on a Timetable in Afghanistan
The President basically did everything he said he would here. We are out of Iraq. We did surge in Afghanistan, but are now winding down our involvement, in line with the time table the President set.
Grade: A
Overall Grade on Priorities: B-
(3) How Did We Fare Economically?
This is a quite complicated question, given the deep recession that was underway at the start of his term. By some economic measures, the President doesn't make the grade, by others he does.
Average Annual GDP Growth During His Term: 2.1% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 3.8%)
Average Unemployment Rate During His Term: 9.0% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 6.0%)
Stock Market Return During His Term: 12.1% (average 20 years prior to Obama = 9.9%)
By the standards of economic growth and unemployment, the last 4 years have not been among our better ones. Following a deep recession, we have had slow growth with sustained high unemployment over several years. While unemployment is now falling, it is doing so painfully slowly and at least in part due to less people in the workforce. By these measures, President Obama doesn't rate well.
However, putting those numbers in proper context is difficult since anyone could have predicted following the financial crisis that unemployment would be elevated and growth depressed, at least for a period of time. This is where the stock market return comes in. The stock market price reflects both present economic circumstances and expectations around future economic performance. On this measure, the President is doing great, far exceeding normal market returns and, given that those are nominal returns and inflation has been very low, real returns exceed by an even greater margin.
Of course, stock market expectations can be wrong. The stock market was wildly over-priced in 1999 and wildly under priced in 1982. So while some of change in expectations can be due to averting crises or sounder policies, some is also due to mean reversion or, in common language, irrational panic or optimism abating.
So, it is difficult as we stand here today to judge the President's economic performance. We didn't fall off a cliff and into a depression, something that seemed like a real possibility in 2008. But we also haven't had a "V-shaped recovery" where the economy grows quickly after purging the less efficient elements in a recession. It is a mixed bag.
Grade; C
The President has a lot to tackle in his second term. The deficit is still out-of-control, with no path to balance in sight. Immigration and climate change remain unsolved issues. The economy, while not in crisis, is certainly not healthy, particularly for the lower-middle class.
I wish him luck as he begins his second term, for all our sakes.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Friday, December 21, 2012
The GOP is Playing a Very Bad Game of Chess - But Does That Mean Anything for a Cliff Deal?
December has not exactly been the GOP's proudest moment. They have been out-flanked every step of the way by the Democrats and have looked disorganized, unreasonable and even downright silly. Two events cap how badly they have navigated the fiscal cliff debate:
(1) McConnell Filibusters Himself
President Obama, as part of one of his offers on the cliff, had proposed as part of the resolution, that Congress do away with the need to periodically increase the debt ceiling. The President's thinking was - Congress has to authorize all of the actual expenditures that lead to a debt-ceiling hike being necessary in the first place, so the vote is redundant and all it does is create conflict and risk the US credit rating. The GOP, of course, has no desire to give up leverage on the debt ceiling, which they hope to use to extract additional spending cuts, including entitlement reform.
Hoping to embarrass Obama by showing how little Democratic support his proposal hid, Mitch McConnell proposed a bill that would permanently eliminate the cap on the debt ceiling. His thinking surely was that Democrats in the Senate were not ready to sign off on such a bill. The only problem is that they absolutely were and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved quickly to vote to pass the bill.
All of this put McConnell in the position of realizing that this bill that he has proposed, but opposed, would actually pass. McConnell promptly filibustered a vote on his own bill in order to kill it. That's right, HE proposed the bill, then filibustered it.
That's a high score on the stupid-meter if I've ever seen it.
(2) Boehner Better Get a Plan C
There is no doubt about the going-in GOP position to the negotiations - that they didn't want any income taxes to go up (they were less worried, as far as I can tell, about payroll taxes going up, but income tax rates were critical.) The House has already passed a bill, essentially with only GOP votes, to extend all of the tax rate cuts at all income levels.
Realizing that there was no way that the President was going to sign off on such a bill and that he would likely slam the GOP for holding middle-class tax cuts hostage to tax cuts for the very wealthy, Boehner rallied this week around a "Plan B" - a plan to extend tax rate cuts for everyone under $1 million in income. Surely, he must have thought, if the President vetoes that bill (or the Senate refuses to take it up), it will be the Democrats who will be blamed for holding middle class tax cuts hostage, since he would have compromised and agreed to let rates rise for the richest.
There was only one problem with Boehner's plan - his own caucus didn't support it. Boehner had to suddenly cut bait and not even vote on the proposal yesterday, after it became clear it would fail broadly in a floor vote.
So the GOP is clearly is disarray at the moment, and the polls reflect this. His approval rating is up to 56% in the Gallup poll (and at similar rates in other recent polls), the highest in over 3 years. A solid majority (52%) believe that the GOP needs to give more on the fiscal cliff, while a much smaller minority (40%) believe that the President hasn't given enough.
All of that said, I don't know how this will play out. Knowing how badly they've fumbled and that the nation is uniting against their point of view, the GOP should give ground. A conservative friend of mine, certainly no fan of the President or the Democrats (he told me the last time he voted for a Democrat was a state senate race in Virginia in 1988), put it very clearly - "we had an election over this. We lost. We need to get over it." But the modern GOP is a complex animal. Certainly Boehner and the mainstream Democrats in the Senate from purple states (see John McCain or the departing Scott Brown) want a deal. But the Tea-Party loyalists who won primary battles on the basis of their ideological purity, may not care a whiff that the public is against them. If they can't even get behind a $1 million+ rate hike increase, what are the odds that they can support a deal that the President can live with?
The best chance for a deal is a coalition of most of the Democratic party with the most moderate elements of the GOP. Until the new House is sworn in come January, there are only 193 Democrats in the House, with 218 votes needed to pass a compromise, meaning that any deal that attracted all of the Democrats would need 25 Republican votes. Realistically, any deal that attracted significant GOP support would likely lose some Democratic support from the far-left, so a more realistic scenario might be a deal that say wins all but 20 of the Democrats and wins 45 Republican votes. Such a deal would require some hard selling in the House by Boehner and Pelosi.
In the Senate, assuming the deal is not deficit-reducing and subject to reconciliation, which is a safe assumption since the "base case" of going over the fiscal cliff is likely far more deficit-reducing than anything that will be agreed to, you would need all the Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents plus 7 Republicans to break a filibuster. There are a lot more moderate Republicans in the Senate, so this seems a much easier goal to reach with a deal than in the House.
Of course, come January, both the Senate and the House become more Democratic, meaning a deal would require less GOP support to pass. And with Congress headed home for the holiday and not due back until December 27th, the time window to get a deal done before the cliff goes into effect is running short.
I think at this point it is 50/50 that we get a deal before the New Year. Unfortunately for congress and the President, the Mayan Zombie Invasion (or whatever nonsense was supposed to happen today) didn't happen, so they will have to deal with this issue.
Expect a deal of some sort early in the New Year if we don't get more 11th-hour heroics in the next week and a half. It might look something like having rates rise on those making over $400 or $500K, having Social Security indexed to chained CPI rather than regular CPI-U, patching the AMT and repealing some of the DoD sequestration cuts.
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(1) McConnell Filibusters Himself
President Obama, as part of one of his offers on the cliff, had proposed as part of the resolution, that Congress do away with the need to periodically increase the debt ceiling. The President's thinking was - Congress has to authorize all of the actual expenditures that lead to a debt-ceiling hike being necessary in the first place, so the vote is redundant and all it does is create conflict and risk the US credit rating. The GOP, of course, has no desire to give up leverage on the debt ceiling, which they hope to use to extract additional spending cuts, including entitlement reform.
Hoping to embarrass Obama by showing how little Democratic support his proposal hid, Mitch McConnell proposed a bill that would permanently eliminate the cap on the debt ceiling. His thinking surely was that Democrats in the Senate were not ready to sign off on such a bill. The only problem is that they absolutely were and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved quickly to vote to pass the bill.
All of this put McConnell in the position of realizing that this bill that he has proposed, but opposed, would actually pass. McConnell promptly filibustered a vote on his own bill in order to kill it. That's right, HE proposed the bill, then filibustered it.
That's a high score on the stupid-meter if I've ever seen it.
(2) Boehner Better Get a Plan C
There is no doubt about the going-in GOP position to the negotiations - that they didn't want any income taxes to go up (they were less worried, as far as I can tell, about payroll taxes going up, but income tax rates were critical.) The House has already passed a bill, essentially with only GOP votes, to extend all of the tax rate cuts at all income levels.
Realizing that there was no way that the President was going to sign off on such a bill and that he would likely slam the GOP for holding middle-class tax cuts hostage to tax cuts for the very wealthy, Boehner rallied this week around a "Plan B" - a plan to extend tax rate cuts for everyone under $1 million in income. Surely, he must have thought, if the President vetoes that bill (or the Senate refuses to take it up), it will be the Democrats who will be blamed for holding middle class tax cuts hostage, since he would have compromised and agreed to let rates rise for the richest.
There was only one problem with Boehner's plan - his own caucus didn't support it. Boehner had to suddenly cut bait and not even vote on the proposal yesterday, after it became clear it would fail broadly in a floor vote.
So the GOP is clearly is disarray at the moment, and the polls reflect this. His approval rating is up to 56% in the Gallup poll (and at similar rates in other recent polls), the highest in over 3 years. A solid majority (52%) believe that the GOP needs to give more on the fiscal cliff, while a much smaller minority (40%) believe that the President hasn't given enough.
All of that said, I don't know how this will play out. Knowing how badly they've fumbled and that the nation is uniting against their point of view, the GOP should give ground. A conservative friend of mine, certainly no fan of the President or the Democrats (he told me the last time he voted for a Democrat was a state senate race in Virginia in 1988), put it very clearly - "we had an election over this. We lost. We need to get over it." But the modern GOP is a complex animal. Certainly Boehner and the mainstream Democrats in the Senate from purple states (see John McCain or the departing Scott Brown) want a deal. But the Tea-Party loyalists who won primary battles on the basis of their ideological purity, may not care a whiff that the public is against them. If they can't even get behind a $1 million+ rate hike increase, what are the odds that they can support a deal that the President can live with?
The best chance for a deal is a coalition of most of the Democratic party with the most moderate elements of the GOP. Until the new House is sworn in come January, there are only 193 Democrats in the House, with 218 votes needed to pass a compromise, meaning that any deal that attracted all of the Democrats would need 25 Republican votes. Realistically, any deal that attracted significant GOP support would likely lose some Democratic support from the far-left, so a more realistic scenario might be a deal that say wins all but 20 of the Democrats and wins 45 Republican votes. Such a deal would require some hard selling in the House by Boehner and Pelosi.
In the Senate, assuming the deal is not deficit-reducing and subject to reconciliation, which is a safe assumption since the "base case" of going over the fiscal cliff is likely far more deficit-reducing than anything that will be agreed to, you would need all the Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents plus 7 Republicans to break a filibuster. There are a lot more moderate Republicans in the Senate, so this seems a much easier goal to reach with a deal than in the House.
Of course, come January, both the Senate and the House become more Democratic, meaning a deal would require less GOP support to pass. And with Congress headed home for the holiday and not due back until December 27th, the time window to get a deal done before the cliff goes into effect is running short.
I think at this point it is 50/50 that we get a deal before the New Year. Unfortunately for congress and the President, the Mayan Zombie Invasion (or whatever nonsense was supposed to happen today) didn't happen, so they will have to deal with this issue.
Expect a deal of some sort early in the New Year if we don't get more 11th-hour heroics in the next week and a half. It might look something like having rates rise on those making over $400 or $500K, having Social Security indexed to chained CPI rather than regular CPI-U, patching the AMT and repealing some of the DoD sequestration cuts.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
An Emboldened President Obama Lobs a Gernade, Is This the Ultimate Long Game?
I recall the tax debate of 2010 quite well. President Obama had campaigned in 2008 on extending the Bush tax cuts for those making less than $250K per year and not continuing them for everyone else. The debate took to the Sunday airwaves, but in the end the President blinked. All of the Bush tax cuts were extended for two years, in addition to a new Social Security tax reduction of 2% for the next two years. In the end, it was darn close to a complete victory for the GOP on taxes at least - although really very little happened to reign in the structural sources of spending.
We are 29 days from the fiscal cliff this time, so there is still a chance for the President to blink, but he is acting anything but compromising this time around. His opening volley to the GOP, delivered by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to House Speaker John Boehner, is everything that liberals would want and conservatives would hate. It includes:
* Allowing the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250K to expire
* Further reducing tax deductions on the wealthy to raise additional revenue
* Reducing Medicare benefits to upper income taxpayers
* Reducing farm subsidies
* Claiming credit for cuts that are naturally happening in Defense from the wind down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The GOP predictably hated the proposal. It is basically a non-starter in the conservative GOP House. I suspect it was quite obvious to the President that this would be the case. I'm not sure he cares.
The President's basic negotiating mistake in almost every key piece of policy in his first term was negotiating from weakness. The President has been giving away the farm before the conversation started and then negotiating from the compromise. And often, there has not been a GOP counter-proposal, so the President has wound up negotiating with himself, putting forward increasingly conservative policy proposals until the GOP decides to accept one.
What the President is doing is daring the GOP to make a counter-proposal. He's put forward the most popular tax increases - solid majorities favor raising taxes on the wealthy and put forward fairly vague promises of spending cuts against programs which are not particularly popular.
He is basically saying - "your move, John Boehner".
On the one hand, the President appears to hold all the cards this time:
* The Bush tax cuts WILL expire for everyone with no action, as will all the sequester spending cuts and the GOP is powerless to stop it without agreement from the Democrats
* Obamacare taxes and health insurance exchanges WILL take place under current law
* The President doesn't have to face re-election again - the House GOP does - you would think they have the larger incentive to get something done.
The GOP has held on to one card, however, and that is the federal debt ceiling. It will need to be extended in 2013 and they can again hold it hostage for their goals, in spite of the potential damage to US credit. But even on this topic, the President could go bold and claim constitutional authority to pay debts that are the result of previously authorized spending, although the constitution is fairly explicit in giving Congres the power to borrow money, not the President. But it would likely be tied up in court for a while and be very bruising to the GOP's public image.
Did the President play a very long game to construct this situation? There is a solid argument for it. The "fiscal cliff" was set-up by three pieces of legislation that the President negotiated:
* The 2009 passage of Obamacare, which set the bulk of the associated taxes to go into effect on Jan 1, 2013
* The 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts, which set them to expire on Jan 1, 2013, along with the payroll tax reduction
* The 2011 debt ceiling deal, which set the automatic sequestration cuts to go into effect on Jan 1, 2013
I noted all of this when I wrote about my proposal to whack the deficit by doing nothing - and that is certainly still an option available to the President.
Nobody in Washington wants to eat that many peas at once. But, in negotiations that it appeared to everyone he was losing in 2010 and 2011, the President set up this gun to the head, where he can negotiate back from a policy base where all of the above things happen and, because of the timing he set up, he can do it all without having to worry about another election.
So, what will happen?
Privately, most in the GOP concede that they will have to give some ground on tax rates, although no one is talking about it in public. A possible compromise would likely look something like this:
* Allow rates to go up some, but set the threshold higher than $250K. It might look something like a 37 or 38% rate on incomes over $500K or $750K.
* Give some ground on Capital Gains and Dividends, allowing rates to rise, but not to the full level of ordinary income - perhaps increasing rates on both from 15% to 20%.
* Increase premiums in Medicare on higher income seniors
* Some reductions to domestic discretionary spending and defense spending, but less than would be automatically implemented in sequestration
* Some type of bi-partisan commission to study more fundamental tax reform.
The GOP realizes they have to give some ground to the President and that his hand is strong this time around. But they probably won't give away the whole farm.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
We are 29 days from the fiscal cliff this time, so there is still a chance for the President to blink, but he is acting anything but compromising this time around. His opening volley to the GOP, delivered by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to House Speaker John Boehner, is everything that liberals would want and conservatives would hate. It includes:
* Allowing the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250K to expire
* Further reducing tax deductions on the wealthy to raise additional revenue
* Reducing Medicare benefits to upper income taxpayers
* Reducing farm subsidies
* Claiming credit for cuts that are naturally happening in Defense from the wind down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The GOP predictably hated the proposal. It is basically a non-starter in the conservative GOP House. I suspect it was quite obvious to the President that this would be the case. I'm not sure he cares.
The President's basic negotiating mistake in almost every key piece of policy in his first term was negotiating from weakness. The President has been giving away the farm before the conversation started and then negotiating from the compromise. And often, there has not been a GOP counter-proposal, so the President has wound up negotiating with himself, putting forward increasingly conservative policy proposals until the GOP decides to accept one.
What the President is doing is daring the GOP to make a counter-proposal. He's put forward the most popular tax increases - solid majorities favor raising taxes on the wealthy and put forward fairly vague promises of spending cuts against programs which are not particularly popular.
He is basically saying - "your move, John Boehner".
On the one hand, the President appears to hold all the cards this time:
* The Bush tax cuts WILL expire for everyone with no action, as will all the sequester spending cuts and the GOP is powerless to stop it without agreement from the Democrats
* Obamacare taxes and health insurance exchanges WILL take place under current law
* The President doesn't have to face re-election again - the House GOP does - you would think they have the larger incentive to get something done.
The GOP has held on to one card, however, and that is the federal debt ceiling. It will need to be extended in 2013 and they can again hold it hostage for their goals, in spite of the potential damage to US credit. But even on this topic, the President could go bold and claim constitutional authority to pay debts that are the result of previously authorized spending, although the constitution is fairly explicit in giving Congres the power to borrow money, not the President. But it would likely be tied up in court for a while and be very bruising to the GOP's public image.
Did the President play a very long game to construct this situation? There is a solid argument for it. The "fiscal cliff" was set-up by three pieces of legislation that the President negotiated:
* The 2009 passage of Obamacare, which set the bulk of the associated taxes to go into effect on Jan 1, 2013
* The 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts, which set them to expire on Jan 1, 2013, along with the payroll tax reduction
* The 2011 debt ceiling deal, which set the automatic sequestration cuts to go into effect on Jan 1, 2013
I noted all of this when I wrote about my proposal to whack the deficit by doing nothing - and that is certainly still an option available to the President.
Nobody in Washington wants to eat that many peas at once. But, in negotiations that it appeared to everyone he was losing in 2010 and 2011, the President set up this gun to the head, where he can negotiate back from a policy base where all of the above things happen and, because of the timing he set up, he can do it all without having to worry about another election.
So, what will happen?
Privately, most in the GOP concede that they will have to give some ground on tax rates, although no one is talking about it in public. A possible compromise would likely look something like this:
* Allow rates to go up some, but set the threshold higher than $250K. It might look something like a 37 or 38% rate on incomes over $500K or $750K.
* Give some ground on Capital Gains and Dividends, allowing rates to rise, but not to the full level of ordinary income - perhaps increasing rates on both from 15% to 20%.
* Increase premiums in Medicare on higher income seniors
* Some reductions to domestic discretionary spending and defense spending, but less than would be automatically implemented in sequestration
* Some type of bi-partisan commission to study more fundamental tax reform.
The GOP realizes they have to give some ground to the President and that his hand is strong this time around. But they probably won't give away the whole farm.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
President Obama to Face Into the Fiscal Cliff, Mitt Romney Exits Stage Left
The Defining Moment of the President's Second Term
Perhaps the most important moments of President Obama's second term will actually come before his second term officially begins.
The negotiations over the so-called "fiscal cliff" will represent the most critical decisions around tax and spending policy that have been made in 20 years.
A combination of President Obama's Health Care legislation, the nature of some of the temporary tax cuts enacted as part of the stimulus (and later extended) and the expiration of the (once extended under Obama) Bush tax cuts, have led the law to converge to where the following things will automatically happen on December 31st or January 1st, absent action from Congress and the President:
* Expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts for all income levels. Income rates at the low end of the income spectrum would rise from 10% to 15% and at the top end from 36% to 39.6%.
* With expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, qualified dividend taxes would increase from the present level of 15% to normal income tax levels (up to 39.6%). Additionally, capital gains taxes would rise from 15% to 20%.
* Inheritance taxes would return to pre-Bush levels.
* Social Security taxes would return to their "normal" levels, a 2% tax increase from the reduced rates of the past 2 years, enacted as part of the stimulus and then extended.
* An additional 0.9% earned income tax on incomes over $200K for individuals and $250K for married couples would be enacted, raising their total income tax rate to 40.2%. This was part of the health care legislation.
* An additional 3.9% dividend and capital gains tax would take effect for individuals with incomes over $200K and married couples with incomes over $250K. The combination of this and the Bush-era tax cuts expiring would increase dividend taxes for top earners from 15% to 43.5% and on capital gains from 15% to 23.9%.
* Alternative minimum taxes would revert back to their 2000 levels, essentially wiping out the effectiveness of tax deductions and exemptions for the upper-middle class and above.
* Extended unemployment benefits would end, meaning that the current 73 weeks of extended unemployment benefits available to the long-term unemployed would be reduced to 26 weeks, taking millions out of the benefit.
* Approximately $65B in cuts in defense and $65B in cuts in non-Social Security entitlements and discretionary spending would automatically be enacted.
That's a massive number of tax increases and spending cuts all set to take place at once. According to the Congressional Budget Office, total taxes from 2012 to 2014 would rise by $774B. Total spending would stay essentially flat, rising by $33B with a 7% reduction (before inflation) in discretionary spending offset by a 5.9% rise in entitlement spending, spurred by the continued growth in Social Security and Medicare outlays.
In net, the deficit would fall to $387B from $1.128T in just two years, a dramatic reduction and the lowest deficit as a percentage of GDP since the Clinton surpluses and well below the long run average of the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations, even after factoring in the potential for a mild recession in 2013 as a result of all the money being sucked out of the system.
The fiscal cliff is actually not bad economic policy - it essentially amounts to finally taking our medicine and paying our bills. And it seems almost certain not to happen, because no one seems to have the guts to take the consequences of paying our bills all at once, particularly with the significant impacts to middle-class tax payers and the recession potential.
There are 4 plausible scenarios that I see for resolution of the fiscal cliff:
(1) Kick the Can Down the Road
I think this is the most likely scenario. With only 6 weeks to work, the potential for a compromise that all sides can live with seems unlikely, particularly in a highly polarized Washington. A bill that averted all or most of the provisions of the cliff for 4 or 6 months, to give the parties more time to work seems likely.
(2) Let It Happen
This, in many ways, is my favored choice, but seems the least likely to happen. I can envision a scenario where the President digs his heels in on taxes for top bracket payers and House Republicans dig their heels in on not extending anything until the President gives on that issue. It would be a policy that no one in Congress is advocating, but it has a small possibility of happening.
(3) A Grand Bargain
Congressional Republicans have indicated some willingness to increase revenues so long as tax RATES don't go up. The President could cut a more revenue neutral deal that caps or eliminates deductions for higher income earners but does not raise rates, in exchange for what Republicans really want, which is deeper discretionary cuts and reforms to Medicare. I could see a deal where deductions phase out about $200K, the Bush era rates are maintained, domestic cuts are made and Medicare retirement age is raised by a couple of years.
(4) A Partial Compromise
Perhaps they will split it all down the middle. Top rates go up, but not as much as Obama wants. Middle and lower class tax cuts are maintained. Spending cuts are made but not as much as Republicans want. And entitlements go unreformed. After kicking the can down the road, this seems like the second most likely scenario.
Whatever happens will have to happen before the end of the year, so it will happen with the old congress and technically during the President's first term.
The End of the Romney Era
When John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, he got to go back to the Senate and chair the Foreign Relations committee. He is in the running for President Obama's second term cabinet, being among the reported final 3 to run the State Department.
When John McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008, he also returned to the Senate and became a voice for Republican deficit hawks and neo-conservative foreign policy.
Not since 2000 have we had an election where the loser is likely to fade completely from the political scene.
You see, while Mitt Romney has been running for President for the better part of the past 8 years, he has no post to go back to. He is clearly no longer the leader of the Republican Party and has no elected office to return to. There is much that he can do in private life, Al Gore has certainly taken the opportunity to leverage his celebrity for the personal cause of global warming, but it was odd for me to think that after 8 years of seeing Romney on TV virtually every week, he really has no place in either politics or the Republican Party.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Perhaps the most important moments of President Obama's second term will actually come before his second term officially begins.
The negotiations over the so-called "fiscal cliff" will represent the most critical decisions around tax and spending policy that have been made in 20 years.
A combination of President Obama's Health Care legislation, the nature of some of the temporary tax cuts enacted as part of the stimulus (and later extended) and the expiration of the (once extended under Obama) Bush tax cuts, have led the law to converge to where the following things will automatically happen on December 31st or January 1st, absent action from Congress and the President:
* Expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts for all income levels. Income rates at the low end of the income spectrum would rise from 10% to 15% and at the top end from 36% to 39.6%.
* With expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, qualified dividend taxes would increase from the present level of 15% to normal income tax levels (up to 39.6%). Additionally, capital gains taxes would rise from 15% to 20%.
* Inheritance taxes would return to pre-Bush levels.
* Social Security taxes would return to their "normal" levels, a 2% tax increase from the reduced rates of the past 2 years, enacted as part of the stimulus and then extended.
* An additional 0.9% earned income tax on incomes over $200K for individuals and $250K for married couples would be enacted, raising their total income tax rate to 40.2%. This was part of the health care legislation.
* An additional 3.9% dividend and capital gains tax would take effect for individuals with incomes over $200K and married couples with incomes over $250K. The combination of this and the Bush-era tax cuts expiring would increase dividend taxes for top earners from 15% to 43.5% and on capital gains from 15% to 23.9%.
* Alternative minimum taxes would revert back to their 2000 levels, essentially wiping out the effectiveness of tax deductions and exemptions for the upper-middle class and above.
* Extended unemployment benefits would end, meaning that the current 73 weeks of extended unemployment benefits available to the long-term unemployed would be reduced to 26 weeks, taking millions out of the benefit.
* Approximately $65B in cuts in defense and $65B in cuts in non-Social Security entitlements and discretionary spending would automatically be enacted.
That's a massive number of tax increases and spending cuts all set to take place at once. According to the Congressional Budget Office, total taxes from 2012 to 2014 would rise by $774B. Total spending would stay essentially flat, rising by $33B with a 7% reduction (before inflation) in discretionary spending offset by a 5.9% rise in entitlement spending, spurred by the continued growth in Social Security and Medicare outlays.
In net, the deficit would fall to $387B from $1.128T in just two years, a dramatic reduction and the lowest deficit as a percentage of GDP since the Clinton surpluses and well below the long run average of the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations, even after factoring in the potential for a mild recession in 2013 as a result of all the money being sucked out of the system.
The fiscal cliff is actually not bad economic policy - it essentially amounts to finally taking our medicine and paying our bills. And it seems almost certain not to happen, because no one seems to have the guts to take the consequences of paying our bills all at once, particularly with the significant impacts to middle-class tax payers and the recession potential.
There are 4 plausible scenarios that I see for resolution of the fiscal cliff:
(1) Kick the Can Down the Road
I think this is the most likely scenario. With only 6 weeks to work, the potential for a compromise that all sides can live with seems unlikely, particularly in a highly polarized Washington. A bill that averted all or most of the provisions of the cliff for 4 or 6 months, to give the parties more time to work seems likely.
(2) Let It Happen
This, in many ways, is my favored choice, but seems the least likely to happen. I can envision a scenario where the President digs his heels in on taxes for top bracket payers and House Republicans dig their heels in on not extending anything until the President gives on that issue. It would be a policy that no one in Congress is advocating, but it has a small possibility of happening.
(3) A Grand Bargain
Congressional Republicans have indicated some willingness to increase revenues so long as tax RATES don't go up. The President could cut a more revenue neutral deal that caps or eliminates deductions for higher income earners but does not raise rates, in exchange for what Republicans really want, which is deeper discretionary cuts and reforms to Medicare. I could see a deal where deductions phase out about $200K, the Bush era rates are maintained, domestic cuts are made and Medicare retirement age is raised by a couple of years.
(4) A Partial Compromise
Perhaps they will split it all down the middle. Top rates go up, but not as much as Obama wants. Middle and lower class tax cuts are maintained. Spending cuts are made but not as much as Republicans want. And entitlements go unreformed. After kicking the can down the road, this seems like the second most likely scenario.
Whatever happens will have to happen before the end of the year, so it will happen with the old congress and technically during the President's first term.
The End of the Romney Era
When John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, he got to go back to the Senate and chair the Foreign Relations committee. He is in the running for President Obama's second term cabinet, being among the reported final 3 to run the State Department.
When John McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008, he also returned to the Senate and became a voice for Republican deficit hawks and neo-conservative foreign policy.
Not since 2000 have we had an election where the loser is likely to fade completely from the political scene.
You see, while Mitt Romney has been running for President for the better part of the past 8 years, he has no post to go back to. He is clearly no longer the leader of the Republican Party and has no elected office to return to. There is much that he can do in private life, Al Gore has certainly taken the opportunity to leverage his celebrity for the personal cause of global warming, but it was odd for me to think that after 8 years of seeing Romney on TV virtually every week, he really has no place in either politics or the Republican Party.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Penultimate Big Electoral Map Projection, President Obama's Promises, Keeping Up With the Other Projection Sites
First Election Day Polls Open In: 1 Day, 17 Hours
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +0.2% (up 0.1% from yesterday)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 303, Romney 235 (Obama +13 from yesterday)
Current Betting Odds: Obama 65%, Romney 35% (Romney +2% from yesterday)
Current Popular Vote Betting Odds: Obama 57%, Romney 40%, within 0.5% - 3%
On the national level, we drop the NPR poll (which is now more than a week old), add back the Battleground poll (which is now up and running again) and add the NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll (a new poll issuance.)
Obama leads by 0.2% in my aggregation. Of the 6 polls released in the past 24 hours (in green), the race is even in 4 of them and Obama has narrow leads in 2.
What will be interesting to see is that when Gallup, which had paused polling after Hurricane Sandy, makes its final release tomorrow (which it has promised), whether it falls in line with the other polls we are seeing or whether they continue to show a much more favorable picture for Mitt Romney than the other polls.
At the state level, Virginia flips over the President Obama today by the very narrowest of margins. That is a little bit of noise, since it was only +0.1% for Mitt Romney before and is now +0.1% for President Obama. So basically, in mathematical terms it has gone from being a state that Romney has a 51% chance of carrying to a a state he has a 49% chance of carrying. It doesn't fundamentally change the dynamics of the race.
Of significant note is the tightening of the race in Pennsylvania, which as I've noted the past couple of days, Mitt Romney is now fighting hard for, with some progress. It still seems very tough for me to believe that he can close the gap and actually win there, but he's got to do something as many of the other lean states are slipping away.
His attempted path to victory, based on where he is campaigning in the final days would appear to be:
Hold Florida
Take Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio - this would give him 286 electoral votes
Alternatively, if he holds Virginia but losses one of the two big states, he'll have 266 to 268 electoral votes, meaning he will only need 1 other swing state pick-up (Colorado is the most likely) to reach 270.
It is still a very tall order for Romney to win either Pennsylvania or Ohio and Virginia and Florida are no locks.
Think of it this way - in a very optimistic scenario for Romney, let's give him a 90% chance of taking Florida, an 80% chance of taking Virginia, a 50% chance each of taking Pennsylvania and Ohio and a 50% chance of picking up Colorado or something similar. His odds are significantly lower to do all of these things, in my opinion, but bear with me to understand the math - Obama still wins more than half the time in our trial heats.
If you use more realistic odds - say Romney is 75% to take Florida, 50% to take Virginia, 30% each to take Ohio and Pennsylvania and 50% to take Colorado or a similar state. This yields a result in trial heat testing of Obama winning 88% of the time, Romney winning 12% of the time, which I think is about where we are.
Having said all that, the Intrade betting odds are closer than what I am seeing, so you might choose to believe the market rather than me. But I still project Barack Obama to win a 2nd term, in all likelihood.
I'm expecting an insane amount of polling to release tomorrow, as most of the firms release their last numbers before the election, so we may see some shifts - stay tuned for that.
Assessing President Obama's Campaign Promises
On the campaign trail in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama made a lot of promises about what he would do if he got to office. Most Presidential candidates do.
The difference between the 2008 cycle and previous cycles is the level of documentation that has been made of those promises and the great work done by the folks at politifact.com and the St. Petersburg Times to track his progress against those promises.
In the first few years of his Presidency, I wrote fairly frequently about the topic of the President and how his performance tracked to what he promised on the campaign trail. As the 2012 campaign has worn on, I've written significantly less on the topic as this space has largely been dedicated to documenting and analyzing the dynamics of the election battle.
But, as we approach the election, I think in the interest of making an informed decision in the ballot box, it is worth another look at the President's promises and what he has done.
First, my usual caveats. This is about the President doing what he said he was going to do, NOT the wisdom of those choices. For instance, one of the promises that the President has kept is to expand eligibility for Medicaid and SCHIP, two health care programs that provide support to lower income people. You may think this is a bad idea - that the expanse of entitlement programs is a big part of our deficit problem and the President was ill-advised to do so. But he said he would do it on the campaign trail and he did it and that's all we are measuring here.
Similarly, you may feel that some of the promises that he broke were bad ideas and that he was right to reverse course. For instance, one of the President's broken promises was to close the military prison in Guantanamo Bay. You may feel that Gitmo should stay open and that reversing course was prudent. But he said he would close it on the 2008 campaign trail and he did not, so it counts against him in this measure.
So, with that out of the way, how do the President's actions stand up to his words?
Decently, but not amazingly well.
Politifact documented 508 promises that the President made. Of those, 2 are not measurable as the circumstances have not allowed for testing whether the President would keep his promises or not.
Of the 506 that are measurable, he has fulfilled 193 more or less in full, partially fulfilled or compromises on 79 and outright broken 88. The remaining 146 either are stalled in congress or still being worked on, but action has not been decisive enough to categorize them as either fulfilled, compromised or broken.
If you look at the 504 ratable promises as the President's commitment as to what he would get done and give him a 100% score for the ones that he has kept and a 50% score for the partially fulfilled or compromised promises, then he has done 46% of what he said he would. While there are not comparable benchmarks to previous Presidents as the level of documentation is not there for previous Presidencies to compare, I said at the time of his inauguration that if he could fulfill 50% of what he promised to do, he would be doing well.
Taken another way, if you assume the 146 where there is not decisive action to be out of the mix - the President, after all, did not say he would do everything in his first term, then he rates 65%. Keep in mind that promises that were explicitly time-bound on the campaign trail are counted as broken. 65% is a solid, but not overwhelming score.
But those are just the raw numbers. You must also look at the nature of the promises kept and broken, since certainly not all promises are created equal.
There are too many to list here (although I encourage you to go to politifact and read the complete list), but here are the major ones by category:
Kept:
* Expand Medicaid and SCHIP
* Establish a Credit Card Bill of Rights
* Extend the Bush Tax Cuts for lower incomes
* Close the doughnut hole in Medicare prescription drug benefits
* A whole host of promises related to universal healthcare
* A whole host of promises related to better funding and supporting the Veterans Administration
* A host of promises related to withdrawing from Iraq
* Increasing troop presence in Afghanistan
* Expand the START treaty
* A host of promises related to educational reform
* Repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell
* Sign the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act
* Seeking and killing Osama Bin Laden
Broken:
* Close Gitmo
* End Bush tax cuts for upper incomes
* Reform prescription drug industry, including allow reimported drugs
* Toughen rules for former lobbyists in his administration
* Increase the minimum wage to $9.50/hr
* Reduce earmarks
* Submit a comprehensive immigration bill in his first year in office
* Cut the deficit in half in his first term
* Pass healthcare reform with bipartisan support
You can draw your own conclusions on what is reasonable to ding the President for and what is out of his control on the broken promises. You can also draw your own conclusions about whether the promises that the President kept were prudent approaches to the problems our nation faces.
But, in large measure, the promises that are broken by the President (the deficit being a MAJOR exception) are issues where he has either moved to the right of how he campaigned or failed to secure congressional support for his agenda. A lack of leadership, perhaps, but I certainly don't see a bait-and-switch in his policies.
We pretty much got what you would have expected from the President in his first term if you'd paid attention to his campaign rhetoric in 2008. The question going into the voting booth is if that is something that you support or not.
If you like this site, tell your friends. And please vote Tuesday, if you have not already voted.
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +0.2% (up 0.1% from yesterday)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 303, Romney 235 (Obama +13 from yesterday)
Current Betting Odds: Obama 65%, Romney 35% (Romney +2% from yesterday)
Current Popular Vote Betting Odds: Obama 57%, Romney 40%, within 0.5% - 3%
On the national level, we drop the NPR poll (which is now more than a week old), add back the Battleground poll (which is now up and running again) and add the NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll (a new poll issuance.)
Obama leads by 0.2% in my aggregation. Of the 6 polls released in the past 24 hours (in green), the race is even in 4 of them and Obama has narrow leads in 2.
What will be interesting to see is that when Gallup, which had paused polling after Hurricane Sandy, makes its final release tomorrow (which it has promised), whether it falls in line with the other polls we are seeing or whether they continue to show a much more favorable picture for Mitt Romney than the other polls.
At the state level, Virginia flips over the President Obama today by the very narrowest of margins. That is a little bit of noise, since it was only +0.1% for Mitt Romney before and is now +0.1% for President Obama. So basically, in mathematical terms it has gone from being a state that Romney has a 51% chance of carrying to a a state he has a 49% chance of carrying. It doesn't fundamentally change the dynamics of the race.
Of significant note is the tightening of the race in Pennsylvania, which as I've noted the past couple of days, Mitt Romney is now fighting hard for, with some progress. It still seems very tough for me to believe that he can close the gap and actually win there, but he's got to do something as many of the other lean states are slipping away.
His attempted path to victory, based on where he is campaigning in the final days would appear to be:
Hold Florida
Take Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio - this would give him 286 electoral votes
Alternatively, if he holds Virginia but losses one of the two big states, he'll have 266 to 268 electoral votes, meaning he will only need 1 other swing state pick-up (Colorado is the most likely) to reach 270.
It is still a very tall order for Romney to win either Pennsylvania or Ohio and Virginia and Florida are no locks.
Think of it this way - in a very optimistic scenario for Romney, let's give him a 90% chance of taking Florida, an 80% chance of taking Virginia, a 50% chance each of taking Pennsylvania and Ohio and a 50% chance of picking up Colorado or something similar. His odds are significantly lower to do all of these things, in my opinion, but bear with me to understand the math - Obama still wins more than half the time in our trial heats.
If you use more realistic odds - say Romney is 75% to take Florida, 50% to take Virginia, 30% each to take Ohio and Pennsylvania and 50% to take Colorado or a similar state. This yields a result in trial heat testing of Obama winning 88% of the time, Romney winning 12% of the time, which I think is about where we are.
Having said all that, the Intrade betting odds are closer than what I am seeing, so you might choose to believe the market rather than me. But I still project Barack Obama to win a 2nd term, in all likelihood.
I'm expecting an insane amount of polling to release tomorrow, as most of the firms release their last numbers before the election, so we may see some shifts - stay tuned for that.
Assessing President Obama's Campaign Promises
On the campaign trail in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama made a lot of promises about what he would do if he got to office. Most Presidential candidates do.
The difference between the 2008 cycle and previous cycles is the level of documentation that has been made of those promises and the great work done by the folks at politifact.com and the St. Petersburg Times to track his progress against those promises.
In the first few years of his Presidency, I wrote fairly frequently about the topic of the President and how his performance tracked to what he promised on the campaign trail. As the 2012 campaign has worn on, I've written significantly less on the topic as this space has largely been dedicated to documenting and analyzing the dynamics of the election battle.
But, as we approach the election, I think in the interest of making an informed decision in the ballot box, it is worth another look at the President's promises and what he has done.
First, my usual caveats. This is about the President doing what he said he was going to do, NOT the wisdom of those choices. For instance, one of the promises that the President has kept is to expand eligibility for Medicaid and SCHIP, two health care programs that provide support to lower income people. You may think this is a bad idea - that the expanse of entitlement programs is a big part of our deficit problem and the President was ill-advised to do so. But he said he would do it on the campaign trail and he did it and that's all we are measuring here.
Similarly, you may feel that some of the promises that he broke were bad ideas and that he was right to reverse course. For instance, one of the President's broken promises was to close the military prison in Guantanamo Bay. You may feel that Gitmo should stay open and that reversing course was prudent. But he said he would close it on the 2008 campaign trail and he did not, so it counts against him in this measure.
So, with that out of the way, how do the President's actions stand up to his words?
Decently, but not amazingly well.
Politifact documented 508 promises that the President made. Of those, 2 are not measurable as the circumstances have not allowed for testing whether the President would keep his promises or not.
Of the 506 that are measurable, he has fulfilled 193 more or less in full, partially fulfilled or compromises on 79 and outright broken 88. The remaining 146 either are stalled in congress or still being worked on, but action has not been decisive enough to categorize them as either fulfilled, compromised or broken.
If you look at the 504 ratable promises as the President's commitment as to what he would get done and give him a 100% score for the ones that he has kept and a 50% score for the partially fulfilled or compromised promises, then he has done 46% of what he said he would. While there are not comparable benchmarks to previous Presidents as the level of documentation is not there for previous Presidencies to compare, I said at the time of his inauguration that if he could fulfill 50% of what he promised to do, he would be doing well.
Taken another way, if you assume the 146 where there is not decisive action to be out of the mix - the President, after all, did not say he would do everything in his first term, then he rates 65%. Keep in mind that promises that were explicitly time-bound on the campaign trail are counted as broken. 65% is a solid, but not overwhelming score.
But those are just the raw numbers. You must also look at the nature of the promises kept and broken, since certainly not all promises are created equal.
There are too many to list here (although I encourage you to go to politifact and read the complete list), but here are the major ones by category:
Kept:
* Expand Medicaid and SCHIP
* Establish a Credit Card Bill of Rights
* Extend the Bush Tax Cuts for lower incomes
* Close the doughnut hole in Medicare prescription drug benefits
* A whole host of promises related to universal healthcare
* A whole host of promises related to better funding and supporting the Veterans Administration
* A host of promises related to withdrawing from Iraq
* Increasing troop presence in Afghanistan
* Expand the START treaty
* A host of promises related to educational reform
* Repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell
* Sign the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act
* Seeking and killing Osama Bin Laden
Broken:
* Close Gitmo
* End Bush tax cuts for upper incomes
* Reform prescription drug industry, including allow reimported drugs
* Toughen rules for former lobbyists in his administration
* Increase the minimum wage to $9.50/hr
* Reduce earmarks
* Submit a comprehensive immigration bill in his first year in office
* Cut the deficit in half in his first term
* Pass healthcare reform with bipartisan support
You can draw your own conclusions on what is reasonable to ding the President for and what is out of his control on the broken promises. You can also draw your own conclusions about whether the promises that the President kept were prudent approaches to the problems our nation faces.
But, in large measure, the promises that are broken by the President (the deficit being a MAJOR exception) are issues where he has either moved to the right of how he campaigned or failed to secure congressional support for his agenda. A lack of leadership, perhaps, but I certainly don't see a bait-and-switch in his policies.
We pretty much got what you would have expected from the President in his first term if you'd paid attention to his campaign rhetoric in 2008. The question going into the voting booth is if that is something that you support or not.
If you like this site, tell your friends. And please vote Tuesday, if you have not already voted.
Friday, November 2, 2012
I'm Willing to Predict: Barack Obama Will Win a 2nd Term, Sandy Continues to Disrupt National Polling, Why Is Mitt Romney Headed to Pennsylvania?
First Polls Open In: 3 Days, 8 Hours*
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +0.4% (down 0.3% from yesterday)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 290, Romney 248 (unchanged from yesterday)
Current Betting Odds: Obama 67%, Romney 33% (Obama up 1% from yesterday)
Current Popular Vote Betting Odds: Obama 56%, Romney 40%, within 0.5% - 4%
* An avid reader has pointed out that my "first polls open" denotation is technically incorrect. Early voting is well underway in many states. I guess "first election day polls open" would be the right term, but you know what I mean.
There were only a few new national polls today (more on that later), but Mitt Romney nudged slightly closer to President Obama in today's projection.
But the real action is happening at the state level. The map continues to be stable, but at this stage of the game, the margins matter. And we now only have 3 states within the 2% band that I consider within striking distance. And those 3 states do not give Mitt Romney a plausible path to victory (more on that later as well.)
Accordingly, I am now comfortable projecting that Barack Obama will be re-elected to a second term as President of the United States.
Let me qualify that by saying that there is still a case to be made for a Mitt Romney win. The arguments would go something like this:
(1) President Obama is still under 50% in virtually every national poll. Undecideds will break late for the challenger and give Romney the narrow victory.
(2) No incumbent President has ever been re-elected to a second term winning less states than he won the first time around and it is impossible to see a path to President Obama winning more states than in 1988. It's win big or go home for incumbents and Obama cannot win big.
(3) The polls systemically overestimate Democratic turnout and the actual results will therefore differ from the polls by several percentage points.
(4) The national polls show a tighter race than the state polls and the national polls are generally conducted by better-established, more reliable polling firms. It is therefore reasonable to believe that swing states are actually in better shape for Romney than the state-level polling data would indicate.
While it is certainly not impossible that one of these arguments is true (the Intrade odds would indicate that people willing to wager money on the race believe there is about a 1 in 3 chance that it is), my counterarguments would be as follows:
(1) Recent history suggest no evidence of this rule of thumb. Undecideds in 1980 surely did break for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter late. In 1984, they broke for Reagan again - this time as the incumbent. In 1992, undecideds broke evenly. In 1996, they broke for the challenger. In 2004, they broke evenly. There doesn't seem to be a pattern here to support the "rule of thumb" that an incumbent under 50% is in trouble - George W. Bush was under 50% in the polling and got 51% of the vote on election day.
(2) True, but irrelevant. No one had ever won 49 states...until 1984 when Ronald Reagan did. Candidates always win their home state - heck, even George McGovern and Walter Mondale did - until Al Gore lost Tennessee and the election with it. The winner of Missouri always wins the election - until 2008 when Barack Obama won without it. My point is that you can point to lots of things that are "always" true - until they aren't.
(3) We've dealt with this one extensively in previous posts.
(4) Generally, the evidence doesn't support this theory. On average, state-wide polls have been at least as accurate and often more so than national polls on election day...see 2000 for a great example of this. Secondly, while there are some smaller firms polling in swing states, there are also a lot of large ones - Rasmussen, CNN/OR and Survey USA are all poling Ohio and their results are actually well in line with other polls from smaller firms.
I don't see Romney winning the election - but, as always, I could be wrong. Similar to my point in #2 - polls tend to be very predictive of elections - except when they aren't.
Few National Polls Available
The fine print on my national polling data is that some of the tracking polls are aging significantly. Gallup, Ipsos and several others have not released polls in several days as they have suspended polling in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I will continue to keep their data in the mix as long as it remains less than a week old, but this is surely hurting the accuracy of my aggregation model. My hope is that we will start seeing new poll releases from these firms prior to the election to make a final projection.
Why Go to Pennsylvania?
I wondered if the Romney campaign would put their money where their mouth is - and they are. Mitt Romney will be campaigning in Pennsylvania this weekend. He's also spending a lot of time in Ohio and some time in Wisconsin, but the Pennsylvania visit suggest a shift in strategy that is meaningful.
So why go to Pennsylvania?
Romney's camp says it is because he is expanding the map. Obama's camp says it is because Romney is desparate.
Truthfully, I think it is an ill-advised move. Romney's internal polling numbers may make him believe that he is actually in much better shape in swing states than I have him. But I still wouldn't go there.
Here is why:
It is almost impossible for me to envision a scenario where Pennsylvania is the "tipping point" state, that is, the state that gives Mitt Romney his decisive 270th electoral vote.
Certainly, it is not impossible that the GOP have been right all along about the likely voter models. So let's say that Romney is 4 points better across the board than what I am projecting, for sake of argument. If this is the case, he would stand to pick up Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire. It would also make Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin among the closest states in contention. But it still makes no sense to go there. Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire would give Romney the necessary electoral votes to win - he wouldn't need those other states. Pennsylvania would just be gravy. And let's face it - the game is about winning - getting over 300 electoral votes doesn't make you any more President than getting exactly 270. You would never risk losing the election simply to run up additional electoral votes you don't need.
The only way it makes sense to go to Pennsylvania is if you believe that it is possible that you might LOSE Ohio and WIN Pennsylvania (or lose Florida, Virginia or one of the other states that is crucial to Romney on the map as it is now constructed.)
John McCain pushed hard in Pennsylvania when he realized that he was going to have to run the table on all the swing states in order to win. It obviously didn't work in his case - he got trounced in PA, along with those other swing states that he diverted resources from.
I suspect that Romney sees that the map as it is presently constructed doesn't work for him - and hope to catch Obama flat-footed in Pennsylvania by pulling an upset there while Obama is focusing on trying to lock down Ohio.
In short - it is ridiculous to think Romney thinks he has Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Virginia all locked up and that he can focus on getting "insurance". It is far more probable that he is looking for an alternate path to victory that doesn't require all 4 of those states, 2 of which he is presently behind in, Ohio, crucially, by a meaningful margin. And that makes a Romney victory a long shot.
Of course, George W. Bush famously did go for those gravy electoral votes in 2000, campaigning in California on the basis of some tightening polls the weekend before that election. He didn't win California - he didn't even come close - and very nearly lost the election as a result of it.
Sometimes when you have been running a campaign for years (as is required these days), you don't make the best judgements.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +0.4% (down 0.3% from yesterday)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 290, Romney 248 (unchanged from yesterday)
Current Betting Odds: Obama 67%, Romney 33% (Obama up 1% from yesterday)
Current Popular Vote Betting Odds: Obama 56%, Romney 40%, within 0.5% - 4%
* An avid reader has pointed out that my "first polls open" denotation is technically incorrect. Early voting is well underway in many states. I guess "first election day polls open" would be the right term, but you know what I mean.
There were only a few new national polls today (more on that later), but Mitt Romney nudged slightly closer to President Obama in today's projection.
But the real action is happening at the state level. The map continues to be stable, but at this stage of the game, the margins matter. And we now only have 3 states within the 2% band that I consider within striking distance. And those 3 states do not give Mitt Romney a plausible path to victory (more on that later as well.)
Accordingly, I am now comfortable projecting that Barack Obama will be re-elected to a second term as President of the United States.
Let me qualify that by saying that there is still a case to be made for a Mitt Romney win. The arguments would go something like this:
(1) President Obama is still under 50% in virtually every national poll. Undecideds will break late for the challenger and give Romney the narrow victory.
(2) No incumbent President has ever been re-elected to a second term winning less states than he won the first time around and it is impossible to see a path to President Obama winning more states than in 1988. It's win big or go home for incumbents and Obama cannot win big.
(3) The polls systemically overestimate Democratic turnout and the actual results will therefore differ from the polls by several percentage points.
(4) The national polls show a tighter race than the state polls and the national polls are generally conducted by better-established, more reliable polling firms. It is therefore reasonable to believe that swing states are actually in better shape for Romney than the state-level polling data would indicate.
While it is certainly not impossible that one of these arguments is true (the Intrade odds would indicate that people willing to wager money on the race believe there is about a 1 in 3 chance that it is), my counterarguments would be as follows:
(1) Recent history suggest no evidence of this rule of thumb. Undecideds in 1980 surely did break for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter late. In 1984, they broke for Reagan again - this time as the incumbent. In 1992, undecideds broke evenly. In 1996, they broke for the challenger. In 2004, they broke evenly. There doesn't seem to be a pattern here to support the "rule of thumb" that an incumbent under 50% is in trouble - George W. Bush was under 50% in the polling and got 51% of the vote on election day.
(2) True, but irrelevant. No one had ever won 49 states...until 1984 when Ronald Reagan did. Candidates always win their home state - heck, even George McGovern and Walter Mondale did - until Al Gore lost Tennessee and the election with it. The winner of Missouri always wins the election - until 2008 when Barack Obama won without it. My point is that you can point to lots of things that are "always" true - until they aren't.
(3) We've dealt with this one extensively in previous posts.
(4) Generally, the evidence doesn't support this theory. On average, state-wide polls have been at least as accurate and often more so than national polls on election day...see 2000 for a great example of this. Secondly, while there are some smaller firms polling in swing states, there are also a lot of large ones - Rasmussen, CNN/OR and Survey USA are all poling Ohio and their results are actually well in line with other polls from smaller firms.
I don't see Romney winning the election - but, as always, I could be wrong. Similar to my point in #2 - polls tend to be very predictive of elections - except when they aren't.
Few National Polls Available
The fine print on my national polling data is that some of the tracking polls are aging significantly. Gallup, Ipsos and several others have not released polls in several days as they have suspended polling in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I will continue to keep their data in the mix as long as it remains less than a week old, but this is surely hurting the accuracy of my aggregation model. My hope is that we will start seeing new poll releases from these firms prior to the election to make a final projection.
Why Go to Pennsylvania?
I wondered if the Romney campaign would put their money where their mouth is - and they are. Mitt Romney will be campaigning in Pennsylvania this weekend. He's also spending a lot of time in Ohio and some time in Wisconsin, but the Pennsylvania visit suggest a shift in strategy that is meaningful.
So why go to Pennsylvania?
Romney's camp says it is because he is expanding the map. Obama's camp says it is because Romney is desparate.
Truthfully, I think it is an ill-advised move. Romney's internal polling numbers may make him believe that he is actually in much better shape in swing states than I have him. But I still wouldn't go there.
Here is why:
It is almost impossible for me to envision a scenario where Pennsylvania is the "tipping point" state, that is, the state that gives Mitt Romney his decisive 270th electoral vote.
Certainly, it is not impossible that the GOP have been right all along about the likely voter models. So let's say that Romney is 4 points better across the board than what I am projecting, for sake of argument. If this is the case, he would stand to pick up Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire. It would also make Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin among the closest states in contention. But it still makes no sense to go there. Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire would give Romney the necessary electoral votes to win - he wouldn't need those other states. Pennsylvania would just be gravy. And let's face it - the game is about winning - getting over 300 electoral votes doesn't make you any more President than getting exactly 270. You would never risk losing the election simply to run up additional electoral votes you don't need.
The only way it makes sense to go to Pennsylvania is if you believe that it is possible that you might LOSE Ohio and WIN Pennsylvania (or lose Florida, Virginia or one of the other states that is crucial to Romney on the map as it is now constructed.)
John McCain pushed hard in Pennsylvania when he realized that he was going to have to run the table on all the swing states in order to win. It obviously didn't work in his case - he got trounced in PA, along with those other swing states that he diverted resources from.
I suspect that Romney sees that the map as it is presently constructed doesn't work for him - and hope to catch Obama flat-footed in Pennsylvania by pulling an upset there while Obama is focusing on trying to lock down Ohio.
In short - it is ridiculous to think Romney thinks he has Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Virginia all locked up and that he can focus on getting "insurance". It is far more probable that he is looking for an alternate path to victory that doesn't require all 4 of those states, 2 of which he is presently behind in, Ohio, crucially, by a meaningful margin. And that makes a Romney victory a long shot.
Of course, George W. Bush famously did go for those gravy electoral votes in 2000, campaigning in California on the basis of some tightening polls the weekend before that election. He didn't win California - he didn't even come close - and very nearly lost the election as a result of it.
Sometimes when you have been running a campaign for years (as is required these days), you don't make the best judgements.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
The Big Electoral Map - Obama's Big Convention Bounce - Will It Last?
Days Until The Election: 58
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +5.0% (up 4.2% from 2 weeks ago)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 332, Romney 206 (Obama +38 from last week)
We are just a few days removed from the back-to-back conventions and the polling verdict is in: advantage Obama.
He has surged in the national polls, breaking out of a range he had been in of +0-3% to go up a full 5 points nationally. He reclaims all of the ground on the electoral map that Mitt Romney had chipped away following the announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate.
There is good news and there is bad news for Romney related to these latest batch of polls.
The good news is that not all convention bounces stick. Michael Dukakis was famously up versus George H.W. Bush in 1988 and went on to lose badly. Bounces often happen for a few days as people bask in the patriotism and unity presented at these events, then fade as cooler heads prevail and people remember the reasons that they didn't like a candidate in the first place.
The bad news for Romney is that the shifts in national polling are not even yet fully reflected in the state polls as many of the state polls in my averages are still from prior to the DNC. It is very possible that Romney is behind in North Carolina as I write this and that Obama's margins in key states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia are larger than I am currently reflecting.
There is still a lot of race left - 58 days is an eternity in Presidential politics and there are still the 4 debates (3 Presidential and 1 Vice-Presidential) to take place, all of which represent potential key turning points in the race, but Romney has his work cut out for him.
To give perspective - the odds on this race are presently at 59%-41% on Intrade, favoring Obama, but not by a massively larger amount than it has favored him for the bulk of this year.
As a reminder, here is the debate schedule for this year (all times are Eastern):
October 3rd - Denver, Colorado - 9 PM - Focus: Domestic Policy (Moderator: Jim Lehrer - PBS)
October 11th - Danville, Kentucky - 9 PM - VP Debate (Moderator: Martha Raddatz - ABC)
October 16th - Hempstead, New York - 9 PM - Focus: Open - Town Hall Format (Moderator: Candy Crowley - CNN)
October 22nd - Boca Raton, Florida - 9 PM - Focus: Foreign Policy (Moderator: Bob Schiffer - CBS)
Notably losing out on debate moderation is NBC, which hasn't had the same kind of gravitas in the political world since the death of Tim Russert, who surely would have scored one of the moderator roles, had he wanted it. Also missing are the partisan MSNBC and Fox News.
What will be interesting in the lull period between now and the debates (which is almost 4 weeks) will be to see if Obama's post-convention bounce fades and if Romney's series of ads in 8 key swing states have an impact.
If Romney can chip away at Obama's lead in the next 4 weeks and make it a 1 or 2 point race come the first debate, then he will only need to perform solidly to stay in contention. If he is not able to move the needle between now and then, he will need a game-changing performance.
If you like this site, tell your friends.
Projected Popular Vote Total: Obama +5.0% (up 4.2% from 2 weeks ago)
Projected Electoral Vote Total: Obama 332, Romney 206 (Obama +38 from last week)
He has surged in the national polls, breaking out of a range he had been in of +0-3% to go up a full 5 points nationally. He reclaims all of the ground on the electoral map that Mitt Romney had chipped away following the announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate.
There is good news and there is bad news for Romney related to these latest batch of polls.
The good news is that not all convention bounces stick. Michael Dukakis was famously up versus George H.W. Bush in 1988 and went on to lose badly. Bounces often happen for a few days as people bask in the patriotism and unity presented at these events, then fade as cooler heads prevail and people remember the reasons that they didn't like a candidate in the first place.
The bad news for Romney is that the shifts in national polling are not even yet fully reflected in the state polls as many of the state polls in my averages are still from prior to the DNC. It is very possible that Romney is behind in North Carolina as I write this and that Obama's margins in key states like Ohio, Florida and Virginia are larger than I am currently reflecting.
There is still a lot of race left - 58 days is an eternity in Presidential politics and there are still the 4 debates (3 Presidential and 1 Vice-Presidential) to take place, all of which represent potential key turning points in the race, but Romney has his work cut out for him.
To give perspective - the odds on this race are presently at 59%-41% on Intrade, favoring Obama, but not by a massively larger amount than it has favored him for the bulk of this year.
As a reminder, here is the debate schedule for this year (all times are Eastern):
October 3rd - Denver, Colorado - 9 PM - Focus: Domestic Policy (Moderator: Jim Lehrer - PBS)
October 11th - Danville, Kentucky - 9 PM - VP Debate (Moderator: Martha Raddatz - ABC)
October 16th - Hempstead, New York - 9 PM - Focus: Open - Town Hall Format (Moderator: Candy Crowley - CNN)
October 22nd - Boca Raton, Florida - 9 PM - Focus: Foreign Policy (Moderator: Bob Schiffer - CBS)
Notably losing out on debate moderation is NBC, which hasn't had the same kind of gravitas in the political world since the death of Tim Russert, who surely would have scored one of the moderator roles, had he wanted it. Also missing are the partisan MSNBC and Fox News.
What will be interesting in the lull period between now and the debates (which is almost 4 weeks) will be to see if Obama's post-convention bounce fades and if Romney's series of ads in 8 key swing states have an impact.
If Romney can chip away at Obama's lead in the next 4 weeks and make it a 1 or 2 point race come the first debate, then he will only need to perform solidly to stay in contention. If he is not able to move the needle between now and then, he will need a game-changing performance.
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