Think it Through

As a former speechwriter for politicians, I pity President Obama’s scribes this week. Their assignment is to craft a speech recognizing the last U.S. “combat” troops leaving Iraq. I can feel their frustration at being asked to draft remarks that defy reality.

Here is an opportunity for the President’s word merchants to turn frustration into a positive result for the country.

Some of our most effective presidents did not see their speechwriters as mere wordsmiths, but used the process of crafting a speech as a way to think through whether the ideas they wanted to communicate made sense. President Franklin Roosevelt used his scribe Sam Rosenman as a sounding board, as did Harry Truman with Clark Clifford and George Elsay, and John Kennedy with Ted Sorensen. These collaborations allowed common sense to enter into policy decisions that otherwise might have been dictated by economic, military, or foreign policy doctrine. For these presidents, discussing the rationales for policy with speechwriters was like opening a window in a stuffy room to let in some fresh air.

After one meeting going over a State Department draft of a foreign policy speech, President Truman looked to his political speechwriters and said, “Fellas, can’t we just say what we mean?”

I do not know President Obama’s relationship to his speechwriters, but I hope they would be able to write a memo such as this:

To:       President Obama
From:  Speechwriting team
Re:      What to say about Iraq and Afghanistan

Concerning your speech on our combat troop withdrawal from Iraq, what tone do you want to take: celebration, validation, or self-congratulation?

We recommend:

Against taking the approach of the last administration by claiming “mission accomplished.” You were elected because the American people are not buying that line.

Against telling the American public the truth – most Americans will not believe you, and the rest will not want to be reminded. As president, you are expected to inspire, not depress people.

It would be bad politics for you to state plainly what the rest of the world knows. Our invasion led to the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and the destruction of Iraq’s hospitals, schools, utilities, and industries. Over 4,000 American lives were lost, and tens of thousands more Americans returned less than whole both mentally and physically. Toward what goal did we cause all of this? Our government was determined to remove from power a dictator who was the only non-Israeli head of state in the Middle East that the United States could count on NOT TO ALLOW AL QUAEDA TO OPERATE IN HIS COUNTRY. This is too absurd and too dark for Americans.

Against using your phrase “we have kept our promise” to remove all combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, leaving 50,000 troops only to secure the peace. This will surely come back to bite you in the near future. Your “promise kept” declaration will ring as hollow as President Nixon’s contention that he achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam in January 1973, at the end of the Paris peace talks. The war dragged on for two more years until Congress finally shut off funding over the objections of Republican President Gerald Ford.

We are leaving Iraq a physically and economically broken country, seething with violent political and religious divisions. Iraq will be mired in civil war for many years to come. If you leave 50,000 troops as a security force, then sometime in the near future you will have to make a decision whether to allow Americans to witness our troops slaughtered in the line of duty as the peace-keepers or to return our combat troops to Iraq – and thus break your promise.

We recommend you simply tell Americans you are “ending our involvement in Iraq,” without debating the war’s value.

You could say,

“No matter what you think about why we were there, or what we have accomplished, my job as president is to do what is best for America. We cannot dictate the future of Iraq. Sometimes it takes more courage for a leader to say when it is time to come home. It is time. I am bringing all of our military home.”

Another question, Mr. President: is it necessary for you to address Afghanistan in this speech? We believe it is.

We recommend you use this occasion to recalibrate our policy in Afghanistan to comport with reality. Tell the American public you will “bring all American troops home from Afghanistan, focus more on the places where al Qaeda is actually located, and redirect our efforts to win more cooperation from other governments in the fight against terrorism.”

We now have more than 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and more are on the way, ignoring daily signals that their fight is meaningless. If our fight in Afghanistan is about destroying al Qaeda, we are looking in the wrong place. Craig Whitlock reports in the Washington Post this week that “an analysis of 76,000 classified U.S. military reports posted by the website WikiLeaks underscores the extent to which Osama bin Laden and his network have become an afterthought in the war.” If there is any al Qaeda activity, it is along the Pakistan border, according to U.S. reports.

We cannot force the Afghans to fight the Taliban any more than we could make the South Vietnamese fight their neighbors to the north. As Elizabeth Bumiller reports in the New York Times this week, U.S. officials in Afghanistan admit that in the next 15 months the U.S. would “have to recruit and train 141,000 new soldiers and police officers – more than the current size of the Afghan army – to meet President Obama’s ambitious goals for getting Afghan forces to fight the war on their own.” At the same time, these officials report “attrition rates in some (Afghan) units of nearly 50%.” This sounds more and more like Vietnamization – President Nixon’s failed plan to win the war by getting the South Vietnamese to fight.

To most Americans who remember the Vietnam War, the image that symbolizes our withdrawal from Vietnam is that of Americans and South Vietnamese on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon desperately reaching for the chance to board the last ride out.

It was anything but peace with honor. We do not want you to be the cause of similar scenes in Baghdad and Kabul.

If you have ever doubted that President Barack Obama has an irrational love affair with bipartisanship, you will become a believer by looking at his position(s) on bringing the 9/11 defendants to justice.

The president is reported to be reconsidering his decision to try the 9/11 defendants in U.S. courts.  Ever since Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the government would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other suspects in federal criminal court in Manhattan, there have been loud complaints – mostly from Republicans – that he was jeopardizing the lives of New Yorkers and straining their pocketbooks.  Too costly, said Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Too scary, said Republican Congressman Peter King.

A few members of the opportunistic wing of the Democratic Party piped up to complain as well: Senator Chuck Schumer said it would not be “feasible,” Governor David Paterson said it would “frighten” New Yorkers.

A number of polls have indicated that public support for trying the 9/11 defendants in courts rather than military commissions is still substantial but waning in the last year.

This is not surprising, since the vocal naysayers of criminal trials have had the communications platforms all to themselves.  When stung by criticism, the administration’s position has not been to offer an alternative view, but rather to use body language to say, “Hit me again.”

This past Sunday the Obama administration got hit from the left side, in a full page New York Times ad by the ACLU which pointed out that the courts have successfully prosecuted over 300 cases while the military commissions have only been able to handle three cases.  This is an argument the administration should have been making for itself.  (Full disclosure: BRS developed the ACLU ad.)

Maybe it is because of a lack of ideological cohesion among the Democrats in Congress, but it seems that the people the president is listening to the most are the Republicans.

One of the more insightful polls and analysis has been done by Gary Langer at ABC, who points out that the president’s base has had fewer second thoughts than he has concerning the 9/11 defendants.  Langer writes, “There has been very little movement among liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents.  Instead it’s chiefly conservatives and Republicans who’ve changed their stance, shifting toward tribunals by 18- and 13-point margins, respectively.”  The ABC poll shows that Democrats support using federal courts over military commissions.

In other words, by reconsidering his decision on the 9/11 defendants, the president is ignoring the views of his base, not doing anything to win over independents to his side, and telling the Fox News-watchers that he sees their point, and that maybe they are right.

The data suggest strongly that any presidential reconsideration of his position on the 9/11 defendants reflects that the president is paying more attention to the opinions of the 26% of the public who consider themselves Republicans than to those of his own party.  Up until a few days ago, this has certainly been true on health care.  Bill Maher, in an attempt to point out the futility of such an approach, said Obama’s courtship of Republicans on health care is “like a college freshman who spends his entire first year in college trying to hit on Ellen DeGeneres.”

On the 9/11 defendants, if Obama decides to change his mind and reject a system of justice set up by Madison, Jefferson and Adams in favor of one set up by Bush, Cheney and Gonzales, it will be a clear example of a Democrat who only seems to listen to his avowed enemies.

Some of us have always believed that bipartisanship, like partisanship, can be a means to an end.  Sometimes you need one or the other to achieve a goal, such as passing legislation to increase or cut taxes, reform health care, or create jobs.  But the Obama era has elevated bipartisanship to an end in itself.

Pundits continually cite polls and anecdotes that suggest Americans would like to see more cooperation between Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  But we have no accurate reading of how important this really is to people, compared to other priorities.

Let’s find out.  I propose that whenever media pollsters ask people the standard question about the priorities for the nation (usually offering a series of issues like crime, the economy, the cost of health care), we include a new item – “making government decisions on a more bipartisan basis,” or “making sure that both Democrats and Republicans agree on a law before it is passed.”

This will help us to determine the proportion of the American public that shares this president’s elevation of bipartisanship to something that has inherent value.  How does the drive for bipartisanship stack up compared to creating jobs, fighting terrorism, lowering health care costs, etc.?

For years, pollsters have been asking whether or not the public wants Democrats and Republicans to work together, or if the public thinks the two parties are becoming less willing to cooperate.  These questions are like asking:  should we have less air pollution?  And do you think selfishness is increasing or decreasing in the country?  They do not tell us how important any of this is to people.

The president and the timid Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate in the past 14 months have allowed the goal of bipartisanship to derail progress on health care, financial reform, and other issues in the interests of bipartisanship.  It would be important for us to know: is bipartisanship that important to Americans?  Or do they consider other priorities more urgent?

Let’s start including bipartisanship on our issue series in polls.

Data driven public policy – it is a cherished goal of the post-ideological, bipartisan, totally rationalist America we are supposed to be moving towards.  We hear praise in the media for public officials who declare themselves non-ideological and strictly data driven.  Beware of such public officials.

A newly released survey of police officers and commanders in New York City reveals that Rudolph Giuliani‘s reputation as a tough law-and-order mayor in the 1990s was built on a foundation of false data.  As mayor, Giuliani sent word down the line that crime in the city must be reduced.  He wanted statistics to show that crime rates in New York were dropping compared to other cities.  According to extensive interviews among police precinct commanders and supervisors in the city, reported in the New York Times on February 6, the police felt considerable pressure from their superiors to alter the crime statistics.  When the boss asked for something, they delivered.

Giuliani installed a computer scoring system that precincts used to regularly spew out favorable statistics.  The system, called CompStat, has since been franchised to police departments throughout the U.S. and across the globe, according to the Times story.  The story quotes one of the researchers who conducted the study as saying, “Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics.”  What is the sense of having a base of comparison if it’s no good?  Did Giuliani intend to say, “My latest computerized update shows that New York is lagging behind other cities—we are experiencing greater numbers of homicides and drug crimes?”

Giuliani’s CompStat does to police officers on the beat what education secretary Arne Duncan wants to do to teachers in the classroom.  Continuing the policies of George W. Bush, Duncan insists that teachers be evaluated on how well their students do on statewide standardized tests.  The education establishment will compare the tests from one school to another and one state to another to determine where the “bad” schools and “bad” teachers are located.  There are at least three things wrong with this.

First, as parents across the country have been telling us for years in focus groups, this causes teachers to teach to the tests because their livelihoods depend on it.  This policy victimizes students, as teachers are forced to prepare students to memorize information they will need to know to pass the tests, rather than using an array of teaching techniques to challenge students to expand their minds and gain a love of learning.

Second, tests alone do not give a full measure of a teachers’ talent.  Evaluations by mentors, principals, peers, and students all should be considered when judging teachers’ merit.

Third, using test scores as the primary evaluator encourages and even promotes cheaters.  During the 1990s, at about the same time that Giuliani was incentivizing creative crime reporting in the precinct houses, the superintendent of Houston public schools was doing the same for classroom teachers – and winning national attention for his data-driven educational achievements.  Superintendent Roderick Paige instituted teacher pay incentives tied to student test scores.  Under Paige, test scores in Houston’s public schools improved dramatically and its high schools reported the lowest dropout rates for any large city in the nation.

Beaming with pride, President Bush named Paige his first Secretary of Education in 2001.  Then the news media exposed the facts that under Paige’s leadership Houston teachers had changed test results to get higher scores, and school administrators counted high school dropouts as students who decided to “transfer” to other schools.

There is nothing wrong with data, but when it becomes the central arbiter of the worth of a person or policy, it is in danger of deceiving.  Society’s elevation of data coincides with the current passion for the debasement of policies that are based on values (ideology) or strongly held beliefs (partisanship).  This is part of a culture that elevates “bipartisan” to an end in itself.  Does it not make you at least a little suspicious that education now seems to be the one issue on which Democrats and Republicans agree –  and that both parties win support from the  business community, including those companies that produce the tests?

Once again, I think of George Carlin’s comment that “bipartisan usually means that a larger than usual deception is being carried out.”

There are 302 days until the November elections, but who’s counting?  If you are, here are three items I offer as guideposts:

1. The elections of senators, congressmen, and statewide officials will turn on national rather than local themes.

The 2010 elections will be nationalized for a number of reasons: a) the recession and the jobs issue are nationwide problems; b) health care is a defining party-line issue no matter what state you live in; and c) the Democrats control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, so there is no ignoring the fact that the Democrats should take responsibility for the direction of government.  This will make it easy for Republican candidates to make the case that the election is on Democratic leadership in Washington.  They are already starting to do this.

2. The central question of 2010 will be whether voters want more change or more stability.

In 2008 the country voted for big changes and we do not yet know that voters’ desires for change have been met.  Are independent voters in particular satisfied with the changes and now looking for some stability?  Or do they want a different kind of change?

A look at public opinion at this point is not entirely clarifying.  Although there are signs of hope, the mood of the nation is one of worry and wariness of what lies ahead.

A nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center reported in December that 59% of Americans believe the next ten years will be better than the last ten years.  75% of Democrats and 55% of Independents feel this way, compared to 49% of Republicans.  Also, a Washington Post/ABC News poll in December found that 50% of Americans believe that in terms of their “own personal experience, the economy has begun to recover,” up from 44% who felt that way in November.

Voters may think the economy will not get worse in the near future, but neither do they expect an easy road ahead.  The ABC poll reports that in 2008, 63% of the public believed the U.S. is in a long-term economic decline, with only 35% believing “the country’s economic system is basically pretty solid.”  The numbers in December of 2009 were nearly identical (61% to 35%).

Both parties are in a bind, regardless of what the public is thinking.  The Democrats must argue that they are delivering change but also appeal to stability since they are the ones in power.  Republicans will say we need a change, but the changes they seek – inaction on health care and less government regulation of business – were already rejected in the last election.

3. President Obama will make the difference.

If the election is nationalized and the question will be about stability or change, President Obama’s record and his leadership will determine the election outcomes in 2010.

Republicans will be emboldened by the fact that Obama’s approval rating has dropped 18 points since February – from 68% to 50% in the Washington Post/ABC News poll.  Approval ratings can bounce up and down fairly easily.  Obama’s bigger problem is convincing people he will use his leadership skills to improve their lives.  So far voters have confidence that Obama is a steady hand on the wheel of state but they are not sure he has the stomach to fight for them against larger forces – insurance companies, Wall Street – from which they rely on government to protect them.

So far he has been stingy in his use of his strongest resource – his ability to persuade.  The only specific issues where Obama wins a positive job approval rating – his handling of Afghanistan and his role as commander-in-chief – are items that he has communicated on directly and often with the public.  His lukewarm and infrequent statements on health care, the economy, and unemployment have earned him negative job approval ratings from the public on these topics.

Message to the White House:  try being as focused and forceful on the pocketbook issues as you were on Afghanistan.

In 1948, a newspaperman asked President Truman on his campaign train, “Are you going to give the Republicans hell, Mr. President?”  Truman responded, “I don’t give them hell, I just tell the truth and the Republicans think it is hell.”

Just imagine if that same question was asked of the current Democratic president.  His response would be: “I think such discourse has no place in our politics.  I am presenting my ideas and asking Republicans to present theirs so that we can, in good faith, come to some understanding and mutual respect, and together we can find solutions that will help all of our people.”

The party that succeeds in 2010 will need to listen carefully to voters to determine where they are on the change-to-stability continuum. Winning candidates will need to articulate a message that is based on reality and speaks frankly about what they have accomplished, the direction they want to take the nation, and how it is different from that of the other party.

In short, they will need to tell the truth and make the other side think it is hell.

A good rule to follow when interpreting election results and voter sentiments is to ignore explanations that rely on references to religion or God.  I was reminded of this rule this week when I read Mark Mellman’s column in The Hill.

Mark’s column, “Revisiting the G-d gap,” argues that religiosity is dividing Democratic and Republican voters, and he concludes:  “If Democrats truly want to win religious voters, they must adopt a new vocabulary and a different perspective, without betraying the values that define us.”

I counter that it will be futile for Democrats to devise a strategy specifically to win religious voters because when religiosity shows up as meaningful in crosstabs of surveys, it is most often an artifact of political ideology rather than the core driver of political attitudes.  It is true that the highly religious are more likely to vote for Republicans because they are more strongly conservative in their political outlook.  But the correlation between their religiosity and their vote is more often the result of their conservatism, not the other way around.

In our surveys at BRS, we continue to study the relationship between ideology and religiosity, and consistently we find that ideology is dominant.  For example, in a pre-election national survey of Catholic voters in the summer of 2008 (for Catholics for Choice), BRS found that if you consider both church attendance and political ideology at the same time, ideology is more of an indicator of a person’s position on topics such as gay marriage and the teaching of abstinence only in sex education classes.

In the 2008 survey, 74% of liberals who attend church regularly supported legalizing gay marriage, while only 23% of conservatives who attended church less often supported legalization.  In the same survey, 76% of liberal Catholics who attend church regularly opposed “requiring public high school sex education programs to only teach about abstinence as the way to prevent pregnancy and disease,” while 51% of conservatives who attend church less often opposed the abstinence only programs.

The mistake of ascribing one characteristic as a driver of attitudes when it is really something else is easy to make, as many journalists found out during President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.  National surveys indicated that women were much more likely than men to be sympathetic to Clinton’s side of the arguments when the Congress was considering impeachment.  Commentators concluded that women were more tolerant of Clinton’s marital infidelity than were American males.  Not so.  The higher level of Clinton support among women reflected the fact that more women than men are Democrats and party identification was the strongest predictor of where a person would land on the whole Clinton-Lewinsky issue.

Some in the media continued to misunderstand the difference between religion and political beliefs in the elections of 2000 and 2004.  When Republican strategist Karl Rove targeted churches for Republican votes, it was not so much because he knew that being religious meant you would vote for Bush as much as he knew that the churches were places where he could find heaping numbers of conservatives.

There is no question that being liberal coincides with going to church less often, or that conservatives are more church-going, but one should not confuse this correlation with causation.  Comparing ideology to religiosity usually will reveal that ideology is dominant.

As the more liberal, less church-going younger cohorts morph into middle age and make up a greater proportion of the electorate, maybe we will be spared continued commentary admonishing Democrats to learn how to talk in church.

Here are two questions for President Obama before tomorrow night’s speech on Afghanistan:

• How many months did it take for President Nixon to end the Vietnam War with his “Vietnamization” plan?

• When was the last time a general in the field told a president, when asked to assess a battlefield situation: “Sir, this is a real dog, unwinnable, it is a mistake being here?”

Okay, okay, my first query is a trick question because Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization did not end the war. Nixon and Henry Kissinger prolonged the war, which continued until Congress finally shut down funding in 1975. Even then, it was over the objections of President Gerald Ford.

There is no trick to the second question, however, because when General Stanley McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops for Afghanistan, he took his place in a long line of military men who  have called for more troops. The job of generals is to fight, not to consider the possibility that the fight itself is wrong. William Westmoreland assured President Johnson the thousands of deaths were not in vain – with more troops he could destroy the North Vietnamese. Douglas MacArthur had only one military strategy in Korea – forward. Franks and Petraeus believe the answer in Iraq has been more troops. Despite the conventional wisdom that the surge troop addition “worked,” an honest assessment would wait until after we leave Iraq to judge whether a post-U.S. invasion Iraq is a more stable peaceful country than it was prior to our invasion.

The point is what did Obama expect McChrystal to tell him? The president’s time would have been more valuably spent getting more counsel from historians, Afghanistan experts, and anti-terrorism experts, who could have made the following points more persuasively than I can:

First. It is risky business to think you can change reality by propping up corrupt governments that are fighting counter-insurgency forces of indigenous people, even if the insurgents are not good guys. Home grown forces can be stubborn foes, especially when the government they are fighting is no one’s friend. Many foreigners have found this out the hard way in Afghanistan. From the ancient Greeks and Persians to Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in 1988, foreigners have decided to leave Afghanistan when they could not bend Afghanis to their will in this country of deserts, mountains, and caves.

Second, just as Vietnamization did not work because the South Vietnamese did not think the corrupt government of Saigon was worth the fight, so too are the Afghanis resisting American requests to fight the Taliban. They are saying in Kabul and Kandahar what we heard in Saigon: this is the Americans’ war, not ours. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Afghan government has been able to recruit fewer than 2,000 recruits a month to fight. That is less than half the amount expected in the McChrystal plan. The U.S. generals themselves have often mused to the media about their inability to change hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday President Obama will tell us we are in Afghanistan to fight a war against global terrorism. He is right, but sending troops into a country that does not want them, with no stable government, is not the answer. President Clinton may have the appropriate strategy of using strategic missile strikes at Taliban targets, to keep them off balance.

If Obama proceeds with his Afghanization he will be no more successful than was Nixon with Vietnamization. Eventually, we will leave as many others have left, with nothing to show but loss of life on both sides.

I realize that Obama inherited the Afghanistan-Pakistan terrorist mess, but this is no excuse. History is filled with leaders who continue wars they have inherited because they do not want to be the one who pulled out. We now know that Johnson, Nixon, and Bush sent young Americans to die in unwinnable efforts because they themselves lacked the courage to be known as presidents who pulled out.

It’s just that we had hoped Obama would be different.

GLOBAL WARMING BLOG POST CORRECTION:

My last post described both the Pew poll and the ABC News poll as finding that more Americans thought global warming was a “serious problem” than thought it was happening.  This was an accurate report of the Pew poll’s findings, but an inaccurate description of the ABC poll.  In the ABC News poll, only those who said they felt that global warming was happening were asked if they believed it was a serious problem. The actual numbers for the ABC News poll, released on November 15, reported 72% of the public believes global warming is happening, and 82% of those people believe it is a serious problem.  Apologies and many thanks to Gary Langer, director of the ABC News poll, for pointing out my error.

I recently advised a long-standing client who works for an environmental foundation to pay very little attention to the national polls on the environment, because they serve as a distraction from the foundation’s work.  I could tell from the response that my client was thinking, “Odd advice from a pollster.”

The most recent polls on global warming are an example of surveys with hidden meanings.

Last month a new poll by the Pew Research Center sent shock waves across the environmental community when it reported that the percentage of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that global warming exists declined since last year, from 71% in April 2008 to 57% in October 2009.  This week, ABC News released a poll corroborating the Pew findings.  ABC reported that the number of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has declined from 80% in July of 2008 to 72% in November of this year.

But the story does not end there.  Both polls asked questions about whether global warming was a serious problem, and both reported that more people thought global warming was a serious problem than said there was evidence that it existed.

Say what?

Pew reported that 57% think it exists and 68% think it is a serious problem.  ABC reports that 72% say it is occurring and 82% say it is a serious problem.

The answer to the conundrum lies in question wording.  Pew asks:  “From what you have heard and read, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades?”  Therefore, you could believe that the “evidence” might not be solid, but still think this is a serious problem we need to address.

The ABC question asks: “You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up slowly over the past 100 years.  What is your personal opinion on this – do you think this is probably happening or do you think this is probably not happening?”  You might think that the world’s temperature has only been going up for the past 50 years and still be concerned about it.

In our work at BRS, we know from focus groups that people do not think about global warming in terms of its causes – CO₂ emissions – as much as its impact.  Most people can only talk about global warming in terms of what impacts it may have.  A question on awareness, therefore, needs references to the stated impacts of global warming in order to provide a context that people can understand.  You might ask: Do you agree or disagree with those who say that the earth is experiencing global warming, which they say is causing the melting of the polar icecaps and more severe weather?

Providing context is just as important in reporting poll results as in question wording.  Gary Langer of the ABC poll made a good attempt at providing context when he reported in the first paragraph of his release of the poll that “the drop … (is) almost exclusively among conservatives and Republicans.”  Since Republicans make up just 25% of Americans in the ABC poll, this gives you a better idea of how widespread – or not – the drop in awareness has become.  It is one thing if Americans across the board are becoming skeptical on global warming.  It is quite another if the drop is limited primarily to a group of people representing a quarter of the country, half of whom (52%) also believe that the liberal activist group Acorn stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama.

Deeper into the ABC poll, we learn that a majority – 55% – still want the United States to take action on global warming even if other major industrial countries such as China and India do less.  A similar number – 59% – in the Pew poll favor “setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions and making companies pay for their emissions, even if it may mean higher energy prices.”

The bottom line is that more people may have doubts about solid evidence or 100-year time expanses on global warming; but majorities believe it is a problem that we should address now.   As I said, do not get distracted.

11/30/09 CORRECTION:

The above post described both the Pew poll and the ABC News poll as finding that more Americans thought global warming was a “serious problem” than thought it was happening. This was an accurate report of the Pew poll’s findings, but an inaccurate description of the ABC poll. In the ABC News poll, only those who said they felt that global warming was happening were asked if they believed it was a serious problem. The actual numbers for the ABC News poll, released on November 15, reported 72% of the public believes global warming is happening, and 82% of those people believe it is a serious problem. Apologies and many thanks to Gary Langer, director of the ABC News poll, for pointing out my error.

While over 200,000 Americans lose their jobs each month, the investment bankers and insurance company executives whose reckless behavior caused the crisis are enjoying record profits and over $100 billion in salaries and bonuses this year.

President Obama’s economic team, afraid of offending the offenders on Wall Street, has done little to correct this immoral and economically unsound situation.  Two Democratic back benchers in Congress, however, are planning to introduce legislation that requires those who put so many other Americans out of work to dig into their deep pockets to help put people back to work.

Representatives Steve Kagen of Wisconsin and Ed Perlmutter of Colorado have drafted legislation that would place a .25% surcharge on every transaction by stock brokers and investment bankers buying and selling securities, and would use the revenue obtained to fund jobs programs and deficit reduction.

The transaction tax is morally right, economically sound, and badly needed – it will generate $150 billion in revenues that Kagen and Perlmutter would use to create jobs for tens of thousands of our people, working to fix roads and bridges and on other infrastructure needs.   The tax will not apply to average investors because it will refund the first $100,000 of transactions annually.  It also will not apply to pension accounts, education, and heath savings accounts.

Opponents will still call it a dangerous gimmick that will hurt investors and the economy as a whole.  These criticisms fall flat, since the transaction tax already has a record of success.  First enacted as part of the Revenue Act of 1914, the transaction surcharge started at 20 cents per share traded and was doubled by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 as part of his plan to save capitalism.  Of course, the capitalists objected to the means of their own salvation.  But the market did not suffer because of the surcharge from 1932 until Congress eliminated it in 1966.

It is time to bring it back.

The transaction tax will benefit the economy by offering a disincentive to excessive speculation – the buying and selling at a fast pace that produces non-productive profits for investment bankers and incredible risk for investors.  The transaction tax may reduce the incentive to make so many trades, and failing that it will at least make high speed, high volume speed traders pay.

The public will be attracted to the bill because it represents one of the few actions the government is taking that demonstrates that it is listening to the average person’s economic frustrations and the sense that our entire system is rigged by business elites and enabled by government.

The New York Times reported last week that the four largest investment firms in New York City – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and the investment banking arm of JPMorgan Chase – earned $22 billion in the first nine months of this year, which puts them on track to report record profits for 2009.  The Times story, by Zachery Kouwe, was based on NY State Controller Thomas DiNapoli’s report, and claims that “six of the top American bank holding companies set aside $112 billion for salaries and bonuses, including deferred payments in the first nine months.”  The banks include Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

President Obama could take a lesson from Kagen and Perlmutter – instead of waiting for Wall Street to voluntarily cooperate, take action that will restore some balance to Wall Street practice, much needed revenues, and confidence that the government is listening to America west of Battery Park.

Imagine a country in which a small group of religious zealots, run by old men in robes, has an iron grip on the country’s political institutions despite a core following of only about nine percent of the people.

This small but powerful league tries to influence broader public opinion but fails. Nonetheless, it continues to be a force far beyond its numbers for policies that keep women from obtaining rights previously granted by the government, stop the advancement of anti-discrimination laws against gay people, and block other social and health reforms such as educating children about sexual health and distributing condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS and other diseases.

The mullahs in Tehran had better move over and make room for the Catholic Bishops in America.

Our Catholic Bishops represent such a small slice of Americans it is almost incomprehensible to understand why the members of Congress and other government officials buckle under their pressure.

American Catholics make up an important 26 percent of the electorate. But BRS’ polls of Catholics repeatedly show that only about one in three say that they follow the views of the Bishops when they decide who to vote for, and fewer than one in three believe politicians who are Catholic have a religious obligation to vote on issues the way the Catholic Bishops recommend.

Do the math and it seems you can only conclude that the Catholic Bishops represent fewer than nine percent of Americans. Yet the Speaker of the House of Representatives is willing to give way on abortion healthcare services to her fellow women because of the Bishops’ lobby. Last Saturday’s vote in the House limiting abortion services in healthcare won with 64 Democrats and 176 Republicans. That is about 55% of House members, submitting to a group representing 9% of Americans.

Meanwhile, the city of Washington, we learned in Thursday’s Washington Post, is being told by the Bishops lobby that if it wants the larger institution of Catholic services to continue to operate in the city, the government must circumvent its own laws against discrimination pertaining to gay people.

Where will it end? Where are the politicians who give speeches about freeing oppressed people in other parts of the world from religious zealots?