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Published on Leave a comment on Louisiana, First District

With hindsight being 20/20, I have been wondering why members of Louisiana's Congressional and Senatorial delegations have not made flood protection in New Orleans a more pressing concern historically. The government funds a lot of pork--why not something that would have been sorely needed? And, particularly in recent memory, there seem to have been plenty of opportunities for individual legislators to hold up the government's business to get what they want. Maybe the issue is that Louisiana's delegations just don't have the seniority and influence.

And then I remembered that Louisiana came close nearly 7 years ago, when Bob Livingston of the First District was unopposed in his bid to succeed Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. And then his own marital infidelities got in the way, and we heard from him no more.

Just wondering: If Livingston had managed to become Speaker of the House in January of 1999, would we have seen any improvement in New Orleans' capacity to withstand Hurricane Katrina?

(By the way, the current representative from Louisiana's first district is an ace--I'll put my money on him to be a leader in the national government in the next several years.)

Published on Leave a comment on Pork Barrels in NJ’s Executive Branch

The intrepid Joe Malchow is providing excellent commentary on how New Jersey is distributing its state-wide money for homeland security improvements. The short answer: along political lines.

The lowdown on the state funds boondoggle: the districts in question are state legislative districts. New Jersey has forty of them. Each elects one senator and two assemblymen. By a simple majority makeup of these three offices, 17 districts are controlled by Republicans and 23 by Democrats. 58% of districts are thus Democratic, while 93% of homeland security funding is going to Democrat districts.

Read these two posts for more. What is surprising is that there is not more evidence of this type of behavior within executive branches around the country, given the amount of control legislatures have ceded to them in disbursing funds.

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Published on Leave a comment on Score Two for the Home Team

From today's Wall Street Journal, the President makes two excellent selections:

Bush to Appoint TwoTo Economic Council
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
July 27, 2005; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- President Bush plans to appoint two Dartmouth College economists to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, people familiar with the matter said.

The nominations of Katherine Baicker and Matthew Slaughter are expected this summer, these people said. Ms. Baicker, Mr. Slaughter and a White House spokeswoman all declined to comment.

Ms. Baicker, 34 years old, has been on the Dartmouth faculty since 1998 and served on the council's staff during President Bush's first term. She specializes in health economics and fiscal relations between the federal and state governments.

Mr. Slaughter, 36, has been a business professor at Dartmouth since 2002, specializing in globalization and the behavior of multinational firms. [Ed. Slaughter has been at Dartmouth since 1994, first in the economics department and then, since 2002, at the Tuck School of Business.]

The Council of Economic Advisers advises the White House on a range of economic topics. Ms. Baicker and Mr. Slaughter are to fill spots vacated by Harvey Rosen of Princeton University and Kristin Forbes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The council's only member currently is chairman Ben Bernanke.

Globalization and health care--just the expertise the CEA will need for the next two years. Best of luck to both of them.

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Published on Leave a comment on The Conservative Movement at the Crossroads

PGL from AngryBear notes that Max (of the newly and impressively redesigned MaxSpeak) linked to the Washington Post story in which I am quoted as follows:

"I'm inclined to support the Republican Party, but the question becomes, how much other stuff do I have to put up with to maintain that identification?" asked Andrew A. Samwick, a Dartmouth College economics professor who until recently was chief economist of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

I served on the staff at CEA from July 2003 through June 2004. The story quotes me later with:

Samwick said the disenchantment of small-government conservatives has been building since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which some saw as infringing on individual liberties, and the Medicare drug benefit, which created future government liabilities that exceed the entire projected Social Security shortfall.

"Some of these outcomes are really starting to alienate people who might be Republican because they are for limited government," Samwick said.

The story quotes me accurately. The trigger for me has been the fiscal policy, and the unfunded expansion of Medicare in particular. I don't have big problems with the Patriot Act or the faith-based programs. However, the quotes should not be construed to suggest that I wouldn't support the President's Social Security plan relative to the status quo or that I was particularly impressed with the challengers that the Democrats managed to put on the ticket the last time around.

I was interviewed about this topic on the Arnie Arnesen radio show this afternoon. Like a lot of people, neither of the two political parties line up particularly well with all of my views. That's been true for a while with the Democrats for me. It's a newer phenomenon with the Republicans--as they have stood less and less for limited government, which best summarizes my general view.

I think this issue is well captured in Newt Gingrich's recent white paper, with the same title as this post. (The Speaker visited campus as a guest of the Rockefeller Center last month and presented these ideas in a Government course.) He's been out of elected office for long enough now that he can "campaign" as an outsider. Here's what he had to say in the paper's introduction:

For almost a half century, from the early effort of William Buckley and National Review and the publication of Conscience of a Conservativeby Barry Goldwater, the conservative movement has been a dynamic, defining force in American politics and government.

Now at the very moment that members of the movement are in control of the White House, the House and Senate, and many governorships and state legislatures, conservatives find themselves at a crossroads.

Elected officials find themselves caught between explaining and defending the institutions over which they preside and the impulse to continue to criticize and change those institutions. The longer people are in office the more likely they tend to defend the very bureaucracies and the very policies which they may once have campaigned against. The impulse to force a transformation of those institutions is gradually overwhelmed by an impulse to preside. Presiding over an existing bureaucracy is not the same as forcing the creation of a new form and style of government.

Should the conservative movement be:

1. A movement at the grassroots dedicated to insisting on transformation of government into an institution capable of meeting the challenges of a rapidly changing 21st century world within the values of smaller government, lower taxes, stronger national security, greater individual freedom and strengthening American civilization as a unique “Creator endowed” system of human liberty; or,

2. A national and state capital- focused system of defending whatever today’s compromises with the old order of liberal big government requires because after all the people presiding over the system are people we support.

To state it more directly, should we be comfortable with presiding over the bureaucracies, special interests, and spending of the liberal government we have inherited or must we insist on transforming that obsolete system into a new, more dynamic, and significantly different system of governing?

You can read more about Newt's ideas in his new book, Winning the Future.A lot of the book makes a lot of sense. He would prefer that the Republican Party focus on governmental transformation and reduced spending, but he makes an appeal to the religious constituency as well. However, we can also see dissension from those in the Republican Party who wouldn't necessarily agree with Newt's proposals any more than they would with the Administration's policies. Consider Christine Todd Whitman, and her new book, It's My Party, Too.She wants more fiscal balance and almost everything else on the party's current agenda except for the "social fundamentalist" issues.

So the question becomes, "What does the Republican Party look like when it emerges from this internal contest? Which of these politicians represents the core constituency's ideas in 2008--Bush, Gingrich, or Whitman?"

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Published on Leave a comment on Representative Stephanie Herseth (D-SD)

At the Rockefeller Center, we have started a New Voices in Washington series. One of my biggest disappointments with the Presidential conventions last summer was how little they seemed to showcase and cultivate younger members of the two parties, whom we might look to for leadership in the years to come. So we are actively seeking out new voices to bring to campus.

We inaugurated the series last evening with a visit from Representative Stephanie Herseth (D-SD). You can find her Congressional website here and her campaign website here. She's a centrist--she has to be to represent South Dakota--and she had full command of a range of issues, which mainly focused on domestic policy in her lecture. There are several issues on which she and I disagree (as many to the left as to the right), but it is also safe to say that if the Democratic leadership in Washington held her views, I would vote Democratic.

Here's a new test of the skills of those at the helm of the Democratic Party: can they find a way to make her a vice presidential candidate in '08, '12, or '16?

Read other coverage in The Dartmouth and at Joe's Dartblog.

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Published on Leave a comment on Can We Put These Two on a Ticket?

Via Wizbang, I read two sensible op-eds in yesterday's New York Times, one by Jon Danforth (former Republican senator from Missouri) and one by Bill Bradley (former Democratic senator from New Jersey), analyzing their respective parties. The one by Bradley, in particular, reminds me of why I supported him in the New Hampshire primary five years ago. In particular, I think he has this description exactly right:

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

Bradley then attributes this lack of structure to the belief that another charismatic leader will save them. That seems right, too. Consider Bill Clinton's success, Howard Dean's initial appeal, Kerry's subsequent appeal based on his military record, and the ultimate failure of Kerry's campaign. To conclude his editorial, Bradley writes:

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

I don't necessarily agree with the last one. With the decline of organized labor and the migrations in the country away from traditional Democratic strongholds, the Democrats are probably always going to rely a bit more on personality and a bit less on structure than the Republicans. The Democrats just need to cultivate (not find, cultivate) more credible personalities to run. Given the way he's taken to his new job, for example, Barack Obama looks good for 2012 even with the current Democratic structure.

I'd love to see an Obama vs. Jindahl matchup in '12 or '16. Or, even better, how about putting them at the top of a ticket for a new political party that includes Bradley on its left flank, Danforth on its right flank, and everyone in between?

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Published on Leave a comment on The Day Reagan Was Shot

Via Steven Taylor of Poliblog, we are reminded that it was 24 years ago today that an assassination attempt was made on President Reagan's life. I was in the sixth grade, and I heard the news on the car radio. I was being driven back from an academic competition of some sort.

When I got home, I watched television to get updates on how the President was doing. I remember two images more vividly than the rest. The first was the sight of a fallen James Brady on the sidewalk. I didn't grow up around violence, and that looked violent. I'm glad that many good things have been inspired by his misfortune that day. The second was Frank Reynolds (the ABC News anchor) welling up with tears several times throughout the broadcast. Reynolds' passing a few years later was a real blow for the profession. I thought it was fitting that he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Published on Leave a comment on The Chapter that Wasn’t

Via Brad DeLong, we find Jonathan Weisman's article in the Washington Post about a chapter that wasn't:

At the National Security Council's request, the White House excised a full chapter on Iraq's economy from last week's Economic Report of the President, reasoning in part that the "feel good" tone of the writing would ring hollow against the backdrop of continuing violence, according to White House officials.

The decision to delete an entire chapter from the Council of Economic Advisers' annual report was highly unusual. Council members -- recruited from the top ranks of economic academia -- have long prided themselves on independence and intellectual integrity, and the Economic Report of the President is the council's primary showcase.

The withholding of a completed chapter struck some economists from both political parties as evidence of the council's waning influence.

I only worked one year at CEA, and so I don't know how things used to be. The relevant comparison on "waning influence" would be just the 10 years since the National Economic Council was instituted. One would also want to make some allowance for the impact that 9/11 had on the relative importance of different groups within the Executive Office of the President--some reduction in prominence should be expected. Someone from the Clinton CEA years would have to tell me how influential they were in things like NAFTA, welfare reform, and the failed healthcare overhaul for me to get a better understanding of trends over time.

The CEA appears to have been very influential during the first two years of the Administration. That seems to be due to the combination of Glenn Hubbard serving as Chairman and the Administration being focused on tax cuts. Glenn was involved with the 2000 campaign and has been focused on tax reform for his entire career in government. I could be persuaded that the CEA was less influential after Glenn left. Greg Mankiw was a newcomer to the senior staff and he arrived just as the 2003 tax law was enacted. Even the Medicare bill was in conference by the end of June 2003. Changes in the leadership at the NEC (Steve Friedman replacing Larry Lindsey) and Treasury (John Snow replacing Paul O'Neill) also led to a more unified and collegial working relationship among 3 of the key economic entities. "Influence" would be harder to measure in that environment. Renovations at the EEOB also got CEA staff moved out of the White House complex in the spring of 2003, and that probably reduced the informal interactions between CEA staff and other policy staffs in the EOP.

This isn't a complaint or criticism about anyone at CEA or in the rest of the EOP--it's just an assessment of how things might be different now. I learned a lot from Greg Mankiw and others at CEA and consider my time there to be one of the highlights of my professional career. But even if the CEA's influence has receded a bit over the past couple of years, it doesn't strike me as some insidious development, nor is it necessarily a trend. This episode regarding the chapter on Iraq doesn't really change my view all that much. As we learned last year (if we didn't know it before), the ERP can get quite a bit of media attention, because it is perceived as reflecting the President's policies. In 2004, we got hit with negative press over the economic forecast, outsourcing, the Social Security chapter, and some other issues. Much (though not all) of this negative press was overblown. A chapter on Iraq might have been the chapter to get all of that attention this year. It's not surprising that NSC would look to head that off.

The ERP goes through the White House staffing process. This means that all Executive Branch offices, departments, and agencies have the opportunity to request changes, and the CEA must respond to each request or explain why the request is not being accommodated. The ERP is one of a very few documents that CEA puts through the staffing process. In most cases, it is CEA insisting on major changes to materials submitted by other offices. Briefing materials for the President, comments on legislation moving through Congress, speeches made by the President, and Congressional testimony by senior officials are the most important such documents. Over a chapter on the Iraqi banking system and reconstruction, I'm not sure that I would compromise CEA's authority to insist on changes to all of those other documents over the course of a year. Sometimes, you have to pick your battles, and I don't think this is a new development.

One of the biggest surprises I found in working at CEA was just how involved NSC is in international economic policy within the Executive Office of the President. I would have thought this to be more the province of CEA, Treasury, and the US Trade Representative. That said, I have very positive things to say about the economic analysts working at NSC while I was at CEA--they were extremely knowledgeable about a lot of topics and generally on the right side of issues at meetings that I also attended. (I wasn't around when the steel tariffs were put in place, and I don't know the details of which agencies lined up on which side.)

Would I be happier if the Iraq chapter were in the 2005 ERP? Sure. Do I believe the following quote in Weisman's article?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino dismissed the excision as insignificant, saying the chapter may still be published in some form in the future. The piece dealt with the development of the Iraqi banking system, financial markets and other economic institutions after the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. It painted a positive portrait of Iraq's emergence as a potential free-market bulwark in the Arab world.

Perino said the chapter did not belong in the Economic Report of the President. "A decision was made not to include a chapter on Iraq's economy in the report, as the Economic Report of the President is an analysis of the American economy," she said.

No, it's obviously not accurate, as the article goes on to demonstrate. But is the loss of the chapter a big event in the history of CEA? No, I don't think so.

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Published on Leave a comment on Dean and the DNC

I keep up with the evolving DNC chair selection process by reading Joe's Dartblog and Poliblog. Both of them link to the AP story on Tim Roemer's dropping out as Howard Dean's last competitor for the position, making the Governor's selection this weekend almost a certainty.

I tend to get harsh comments when I try to give the Democrats free advice, so I'll try to avoid that and just go with some simple reflections on Governor Dean's campaign and what I hope will happen under his chairmanship of the DNC.

1) I thought that Senator Kerry came off like a lawyer during the campaign, and I just cannot listen to legalese for too long. It doesn't hold my interest, and a lot of it turns out to be petty. This is the common thread to two posts I made last year criticizing press releases by the Kerry campaign. And Senator Kerry had no executive experience (in government or elsewhere) to speak of, so I was even less enchanted with him as a candidate for the Democratic nomination.

2) Governor Dean campaigned like a populist. I continue to believe that this is a reasonable strategy for the Democrats to reassemble a governing coalition, though I'm not convinced that I would be in that coalition. They have to do it without appearing to be "soft" on national security. I don't believe that any Democrat elected to be President after 9/11 would in fact be less attentive to national security than a Republican President, but the party does not seem to be able to shake the appearance. I don't think the Kerry campaign helped much. In the article cited above, Roemer is quoted as saying:

"If there's one reason Senator Kerry lost the presidential race, it was because he failed to make the American people feel safer," Roemer said, ...

3) My recollection of Governor Dean's tenure as the chief executive of my neighboring state is that he governed as a pragmatist: balanced budgets, expansions of resources for children's health, a sensible first step toward full equality for gay marriage in the form of civil unions, sensible gun control policy, etc. It's true that, as executive experience goes, Vermont might not be the right stepping stone all the way to the Presidency--there are over 85 counties in the 2000 Census with greater populations. But, as Roemer also says,

"I got into this race five weeks ago to talk about the devastating loss we experienced in November," Roemer said in an interview. "It was not about 60,000 votes in Ohio. It was about losing 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country. If that's a trend in business or politics you're in trouble."

I think Governor Dean's tendencies toward pragmatism would play well in these areas, but I am not an expert. (See the vote swing by county at Patrick Ruffini's indispensible blog for related information.) If he runs the DNC by appealing to pragmatists, then I am optimistic. If he runs it like his campaign, then I'm less confident.

Either way, it is a good move for him professionally and we should all wish him luck as he tries to make the Democratic party more appealing to more voters.

UPDATE: Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I see:

Captain Normal has some similar ideas to those I expressed here, though from a different political viewpoint.

Secure Libery calls it lunacy, arguing that this is just another in a series of recent leadership missteps by the Democrats.

Wizbang and his merry band of commenters and trackbackers are consumed by partisan glee.

Time will tell who's got it right.

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Published on Leave a comment on More Advice for the Democrats

My trip back from Philadelphia was much easier than the flight there. So easy, in fact, that I had time to read through this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Democrats Seek Chief for Party Cast Adrift." The crux of the matter is nicely summarized in an early paragraph:

The problem is, the 440 members of the Democratic National Committee - who must vote soon for a new chairman - can't seem to decide who they want for the job. Which is no big surprise, because they're not really sure about the best future direction for the party, anyway.

One of these DNC members is Bob Mulholland. Here's one of the instances where he is quoted in the article:

But some Democrats, yearning for a fighter who would draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans, don't want a chairman who would merely echo the GOP's red-state sensibility. Mulholland said, "We don't need a DNC chair who wants to be a Wal-Mart greeter."

First, I'll state unequivocally that I enjoy shopping at Wal-Mart and that I enjoy being greeted when I enter the store. Second, I am going to go another round of giving advice to the Democratic party:

You may not want a Wal-Mart greeter to chair your party, but you won't win a national election if you cannot convince Wal-Mart greeters to vote for you. And one of the surest ways to make sure they don't is to speak pejoratively about them.

Judging by Bob's quote, it is apparently okay for members of the Democratic National Committee to score points at the expense of people who earn money by being unfailingly kind to total strangers. Would it also be okay to poke fun at these people if, instead of taking jobs as greeters, they refused to do so and joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed? I don't know who will become the next DNC chair, but I hope the person understands which of these two groups of people is a more solid foundation for his party's coalition.

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