Posts tagged democrats
The 2012 White House Budget Proposal. Who Will Survive In America?
Sigh. This is truly depressing.
In lieu of the doc, we’ve given you a handy data viz for the spending allocations. It’s illuminating.
So what’s the big deal? We reprint Jon Cohn in full…..
President Obama on Monday will release his budget request for the 2012 fiscal year. As you read commentary on it—or, if you’re as nerdy as I am, as you read the document itself—keep in mind that this is the first budget request he’ll be producing since the Republicans took over one house of Congress. It’s a huge difference and not merely in the obvious ways.
Obama’s previous budgets were the president’s way of signaling, to members of his own party, what initiatives he intended to pursue and roughly what resources he expected Congress to give him. He could expect some negotiation and pushback, from liberals on some issues and from centrists on others. But mostly he could count upon Congress, which Democrats controlled, to follow him.
The Republican House, of course, will do no such thing. They have their own, very different priorities and their own, very different ideas about how to pay for them. Accordingly, Obama’s budget is more of an opening bid in a tough, rancorous negotiation. That means you should evaluate the document as a signal of political strategy, not simply a statement of policy priorities. And that makes it tougher to judge.
Between the administration’s recent statements and a series of calculated leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what Obama is trying to do. He’s going to call for spending more money on education and other public investments, but he’ll also endorse enough cuts to keep overall non-defense discretionary spending at last year’s levels. Elementary and secondary school education, for example, should get a boost. But Pell Grants, for low-income college students, are going to take a hit, albeit a carefully crafted one.* There will be more money for building high-speed rail but less for helping low-income families pay their heating bills.
Is this a good thing? In absolute terms, clearly, the answer is no. The demand for Pell Grants is unusually high right now; among other things, cash-strapped states are raising tuitions at state schools just as cash-strapped students and families have fewer resources to pay them. Energy costs for next winter, when the cut in heating assistance would take effect, are likely to be higher than at any time since 2008. Unless the economic recovery quickens very suddenly, plenty of people will struggle to pay those heating bills. And those are just two examples of program reductions that will leave needy Americans even more needy.
But everything is relative, and that means judging these cuts alongside both the modest increases you’ll find elsewhere in this budget and the much larger increases you saw in previous ones. Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, will spend the next few days dissecting the Obama spending request and, as he does, he will likely find plenty not to like. But, during an interview, he also put disappointments in context:
I think [Obama’s] record is very strong — major expansions in refundable tax credits for the working poor, major expansion of student financial aid for low-income students so that more of them can go to and complete college, and of course, major health reform that will extend coverage to 32 million uninsured people. This is the most impressive record of any president since LBJ.
Obama’s spending request looks even better when you consider what the Republicans would do if left to their own devices. They haven’t committed themselves to a 2012 budget just yet. But they’ve said they want a far deeper freeze than Obama’s, reducing non-defense discretionary spending to what it was in 2008. On Friday, they offered a preview of that vision when they announced their proposal for how to finance government for the remainder of the current fiscal year.
They want far more severe cuts to Pell Grants and home heating assistance, plus reductions to such essential services as food inspections and the elimination of programs like Americorps. They also want to reduce spending on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children. That initiative, known as WIC, provides nutritional assistance to expectant mothers and newborns. As Paul Krugman notes, that cut will hurt today and tomorrow, since kids who grow up malnourished are more likely to have problems later in life.
The most important question about Obama’s budget, then, is how well it positions him and his allies in the coming debate over these sorts of priorities.
You could make a case that, by embracing the Republican narrative on the size of government and calling for a five-year budget freeze at present levels, Obama has effectively bid too low in the negotiation over federal spending—that he’s committed himself, and the country, to less government than it needs. (It’s happened before!) Or you could make the case that, by making “tough” proposals to cut programs he supports, he’s establishing the credibility with voters that he needs in order to marginalize the Republicans and to preserve more spending than might otherwise be possible. (It’s happened before!)
I really don’t know which argument is right. I’m not a political strategist and, besides, not even the political strategists can be sure about this sort of thing. But I know I’ll be hoping that Obama prevails in the coming standoff with House Republicans, even though a victory would still leave the government perilously underfunded.
*The details of Obama’s Pell Grant proposal are complicated and worth an item of their own, which I’ll try to write shortly.
So on the one hand, Obama makes a political calculation, cuts spending on things people NEED (like higher ed grants, food inspectors, heating oil for the poor). On the other, the GOP stands for nihilism.
Who will survive in America? Besides the rich?
#letthemeatcake #whowillsurviveinamerica
The most revealing moment in either Republican response, though, came from Ryan, who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, implicitly threatened another government shutdown, or catastrophic fiscal meltdown, if the House majority doesn’t get its way. “The president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” he said with distaste, referring to the vote required possibly as soon as March to allow the Treasury to keep paying its bills. Should the House majority hold that vote hostage to its vision of the budget, it will throw the markets into turmoil and upend our still-embryonic recovery.
It tells you all you need to know about Ryan’s tilt to the right that, for all his professed disapproval of increasing the debt limit during an Obama administration, he voted to do so twice himself during the gushing deficits of the Bush years. Funny he didn’t mention that Tuesday night. It tells you all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s overall tilt to the right that not just the Tea Party is making barely veiled threats to play dangerous political games with the debt limit. Mitch McConnell and Cantor did so last weekend, as have a plethora of potential 2012 presidential candidates, from Tim Pawlenty to Gingrich. The Bachmann-Beck-Palin tail is now firmly wagging the Republican dog.
2011 State of the Union.
There’s so much to say, so little time. A few thoughts.
Barack Obama absolutely killed it with this talk. If you didn’t feel inspired and hopeful at various points, check your pulse- you might be dead.
The speech was brilliant as a rhetorical device. But (more importantly) it was very powerful as a governing agenda. It seized the high ground- investing doesn’t mean spending for its own sake. Rather, it’s using the leverage of targeted investment to upgrade the long run capabilities of America’s human and productive capital.
Only one suggestion: “America does big things”- great. “America, get to the chopper, NOW!”- awesome.
That said, the proof is in the pudding, not the talking. And frankly, a lot of the results depend on the GOP. Will they, at the very least, get out of the way? They won’t. But now Obama has drawn the contrast between what we should be doing and what we are/aren’t doing. It was amazing. He shamed the GOP without ever explicitly calling them out. That’s some serious mental/rhetorical jujistu. He’s a bigger man than us here at TS. We would have gone 50 hot ones right from the podium.
Another stark contrast- Obama’s speech spoke to our loftiest national ambitions. The Ryan rebuttal…..did not. Granted, the minority response always pales in comparison to the grandeur of the President’s platform. But his speech seems like rather small-minded pean to the GOP whipping horse of ‘deficits bad. cuts good’. If the GOP does believe this, then why were they falling over themselves to extend the Bush tax cuts? Obama also made this point with style. Finally, I thought it was EXTREMELY telling that Paul Ryan, a ‘leading light’ of the new GOP dared not speak his own plan’s name (The Ryan Roadmap). Perhaps he (and the GOP) know that once Americans truly understand the nuts and bolts of their agenda/this plan- gutting Medicare, replacing it with vouchers that aren’t inflation indexed, and a bevy of draconian cuts to non-military spending- they would refudiate their party with great vengeance and furious anger.
And what analysis would be complete without a nod to the Tea Party rebuttal by Rep Bachmann. Wow. Suffice it to say that if Obama spoke to our national ambitions, and Ryan made a less inspiring, partisan response, then Bachmann/Tea Party represented a childish, petulant scream (“No! I want candy!”/”Repeal, Socialism!, Founding Fathers!”) that didn’t even begin to address the issues facing our nation.
//exhales
That’s it for now. Probably other commentary to follow today. Politico’s take below. Click link for today’s full Playbook.
2. Mike Allen/Politico Playbook:
President Obama’s State of the Union showed ruthless political agility. He’s done a full Clinton makeover, much faster: Aides to former President Clinton recall that they were still scratching their heads in the spring after the shellacking of ‘94. Look at Obama’s five pillars: innovate, educate, build, reform, responsibility. Those last two are straight out of the handbook of the DLC, the Clinton-era temple of centrism. Roger Simon said on our webcast that the speech was “safe … mushy.” But the other end of that telescope is PRAGMATIC.
The speech was couched in rhetoric designed to sound civil, unifying, uplifting. But it was laced with meaty proposals that, according to presidential advisers, are designed to SMOKE OUT the GOP - to force Republicans to reveal plans of their own, and help the West Wing chart where the axis of cooperation may lie. Obama threw down the gauntlet on several monster issues that are likely to be furiously fought, and have lobbyists licking their chops
The Emerging Republican Minority
More political science. Since it was so tasty yesterday. C/o 538 Politics…
The Center for American Politics’ Ruy Teixeira, one of the top political demographers in the country, has a new paper out in which he examines the two major party coalitions, with a focus on the current and future prospects of the Republican Party. For the GOP, says Teixeira, things look grim, in large part because the country is becoming less white and more educated. He provides specific data showing how college educated voters are growing, and non-college educated shrinking, as shares of the electorate; likewise for the growing non-white v. shrinking white populations.
“The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP,” he writes, adding that “the Republican Party as currently constituted is in need of serious and substantial changes in approach.”(Emphasis mine; will return to this point momentarily)
OK, not much new or surprising here in terms of the trends; those who follow these political-demographic patterns know the basic contours of the projected population trends moving forward. What’s interesting are the recommendations Teixeira offers—to Republicans, as opposed to Democrats, the target audience for much of previous writings—for how to deal with the challenges of the population changes ahead.
Specifically, he recommends that the GOP do some or all of the following (taken verbatim from the report):
*Move to the center on social issues. The culture wars may have worked for a while, but shifting demographics make them a loser for the party today and going forward. A more moderate approach would help with Millennials, where the party must close a yawning gap, and with white college graduates, who still lean Republican but just barely. The party also needs to make a breakthrough with Hispanics, and that won’t happen unless it shifts its image toward social tolerance, especially on immigration.
What’s interesting to me about most of Teixeira’s suggested changes is that the GOP is either not doing them, or doing something close to the opposite. If anything, the opposite is happening. Indeed, the single biggest storyline of the past year for conservatives and the Republican Party is the rise of the tea party protest movement.
*Pay attention to whites with some college education and to young white working-class voters in general. The GOP’s hold on the white working class is not secure, and if that slips, the party doesn’t have much to build on to form a successful new coalition. That probably also means offering these voters something more than culture war nostrums and antitax jeremiads.
*Another demographic target should be white college graduates, especially those with a four-year degree only. The party has to stop the bleeding in America’s large metropolitan areas, especially in dynamic, growing suburbs. Keeping and extending GOP support among this demographic is key to taking back the suburbs. White college graduates increasingly see the party as too extreme and out of touch.
*In the long run the GOP has to have serious solutions of its own that go beyond cutting taxes. These solutions should use government to address problems but in ways that reflect conservative values and principles. Antigovernment populism is something the party is clearly comfortable with— witness its evolving line of attack on the Obama administration. But it’s likely not enough to just denounce the other side and what they have done or propose to do in populist terms.
In short, the “party of no” has a limited shelf life. That strategy might help the party make significant gains in 2010, but it will not be enough to restore it to a majority status.
On immigration, if anything the GOP has taken a turn toward anti-amnesty, fence-building xenophobia. The Republicans may have eased off the gas pedal somewhat on tax-cutting, but the conversational shift to deficit reduction and fears of growing government size still carries strong and familiar anti-government overtones. There seems to be less Republican focus on hot-button issues like evolution/creationism or global warming—which presumably turn off many college-educated whites by dint of their anti-empirical and anti-intellectual content—but that is a matter of salience and decibel level rather than a transformation in the party’s issue positions or platforms.
In the near term, as Teixeira correctly points out, the GOP needs little more than an anti-Democrat pushback message: on TARP, size of government, health care spending, whatever; they don’t need an affirmative case. (The Democrats benefitted despite not really pushing all that much in the way of new ideas during the 2006 and 2008 cycles, because “not Bush” was a sufficient battle cry.) But in the longer term, the Republicans need new ideas that are rooted in some recognition of the changing demographics of the country, something that conservatives including Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, David Frum, and Michael Gerson have been advocating for some time now.
The nature of the GOP’s demographic-electoral problem is three-fold. First, the challenge of trying to evolve and adapt is itself limited by demographics because the GOP’s older and whiter residual white minority coalition is simply less amenable to the sort of changes it would take to modernize the party. Second, so many of the figures within the party who might be able to lead a center-right revival have been beaten in recent cycles, with the old Ford/Dole/Rockefeller wing decimated by the 2006 and 2008 cycles. (Relatedly, it doesn’t help when people like Frum are cast out from their intellectual circles.) Finally, it is simply not in the nature of conservatism to foment change or be out in front of demographic and social changes: Conservatism works best as a reaction to—not necessarily reactionary, but a reaction nonetheless—to oncoming, rapid changes.
Mike Allen- The Man the White House Wakes Up To
Meet Mike Allen.
Mike isn’t any part of the elected government of the United States. Yet he wields more influence over the narrative of our politics than any rank and file member of Congress or Senator.
Mike writes a highly influential daily email tipsheet for Politico (it’s on the blogroll). This email, which I signed up for today, is required reading in the beltway. He’s in constant touch with the White House, and every other major player on the Hill.
Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.
Like many in Washington, Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day. Allen also communes a lot with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff; Robert Gibbs, the press secretary; David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior adviser; and about two dozen other White House officials. But Pfeiffer is likely Allen’s main point of contact, the one who most often helps him arrive at a “West Wing Mindmeld,” as Playbook calls it, which is essentially a pro-Obama take on that day’s news. (Allen gets a similar fill from Republicans, which he also disseminates in Playbook.)
Pfeiffer tells Allen the message that the Obama administration is trying to “drive” that morning — “drive” being the action verb of choice around the male-dominated culture of Politico, a three-year-old publication, of which the oft-stated goal is to become as central to political addicts as ESPN is to sports junkies. “Drive” is a stand-in for the stodgier verb “influence.” If, say, David S. Broder and R. W. Apple Jr. were said to “influence the political discourse” through The Washington Post and The New York Times in the last decades of the 20th century, Politico wants to “drive the conversation” in the new-media landscape of the 21st. It wants to “win” every news cycle by being first with a morsel of information, whether or not the morsel proves relevant, or even correct, in the long run — and whether the long run proves to be measured in days, hours or minutes.
It’s fascinating (to me, at least) to watch the evolution of the fourth branch of government (the media) in the internet age. As the Times notes, postwar Washington reporting was driven by a few long-standing, well-connected writers at the establishment (NYTimes, Washington Post) papers. They got fed the juiciest stuff, with the tacit (or explicit) understanding that they would help steer the narrative in a certain direction. The internet has helped to shatter that closed loop. To the extent that relative outsiders (Mike Allen, Ezra Klein, Jon Cohn, etc etc) are able to democratize the information and stories that drive our government, we’re all better off.
And yet, this story strikes me as a real reminder of the somewhat sealed-off, echo-chamber culture within the beltway. Even a new-media guy (Allen) seems to have been captured by his sources (at least to some degree). It makes sense- to win the media battle, you have to win the writers, and co-opting them is the best way to do that. But this cycle can lead to a sort of group think makes it harder to challenge any dominant view. This in turn can lead to disaster (such as the “bipartisan” consensus in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003). Thanks to PS193 for the “source-capture” framework. This is a great piece either way. Meet your government at work.
