Think it Through

The meaning of voters’ behavior in Tuesday’s elections does not lie in which political party is up and which is down at the moment, but in how government and the people who run it respond to an economy that is ruining the lives of too many people.

Tuesday’s outcomes serve as a cold reminder that the public now grades chief executives in politics – mayors, governors, presidents – according to two questions. Voters ask: 1) Have you done something constructive to deal with the need for jobs and delivery of services in my town or city or state? 2) Do you empathize with us? Do you even know what it is like to get up every day in the dark, walk a mile and wait outside in the cold for the PATH train in Jersey to take you into Manhattan — to a job that you are not sure will be there in six months? Does the person at the top understand anything about what the person at the bottom – or even the person in the middle – is going through, especially now, in this economy?

In Boston, Mayor Tom Menino won reelection on Tuesday to a fifth term. As a Boston Globe editorial this week pointed out, in hard times, Menino has shown a knack for making the city run better, with less crime, fewer divisions and better services than the city enjoyed before. He is also someone who keeps in touch with the people of Boston, understands their needs, and makes a point of showing up places that show his sensitivity to their priorities. Menino passes the grade on both of the above questions. On Tuesday, he won 57-40.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has brought about changes in nearly every part of the city bureaucracy to make it run better. New Yorkers see this and credit him, but they are blind to any empathy he might possess. His imperial style, disdain for those who disagree with him, and his heavy-handed approach to the Constitutional change that allowed him to run for a third term left voters wanting to take Mike down a peg or two. Bloomberg scores one out of two in the above criteria –- and he won by a whisker on Tuesday. His opponent had astute political advice, as his campaign took aim at the crown on the mayor’s head, instead of the stars on his record.

In New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine is zero for two on leadership. The voters in New Jersey have no idea what he has accomplished, if anything, and they do not feel that he knows anything about their struggles. From his doomed idea to raise fees on the lifeblood of every New Jerseyan – driving on the garden state parkway – to the French cuffs he wears, Corzine has consistently sent the signal to voters that he is a Wall Street guy who makes so much money that he probably doesn’t even know how much property tax he pays, and he certainly does not worry about it. In focus groups we conducted throughout the state this year, voters’ attitudes toward the governor were polite but they asked, “what has he accomplished? We cannot think of a single thing.” They realized he was dealt a bad hand, but the only thing they could recollect about him was his highway speeding accident.

Seeing Tuesday’s election through the experiences in New Jersey and Virginia leads to the obvious conclusion that the electorate is very unhappy, and the most effective way it knows how to express itself is to act out against incumbents. This may only get worse in 2010, as long as we keep losing jobs and President Obama is seen as not taking bold enough action to turn the economy around.

In sum, candidates, parties, and the president need to recognize that now job creation is the first priority of voters, so it should be their first priority. Then they should also take a tip from Tom Menino in Boston. Show that government can do something constructive for people. Demonstrate a capacity to lead, a commitment to find governement solutions, and a compassion for the people you serve. Otherwise, get ready for a very bumpy ride in 2010.

Ted Kennedy is gone but he is still helping Barack Obama. The person who Kennedy tutored and entrusted with the job of chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 70’s and early 80’s has taken the first meaningful step to bring about a correction in the way Wall Street compensates its executives.

Kenneth Feinberg, the administration’s pay czar has ordered companies who have received taxpayer bailout money to cut the pay to their highest executives.

Feinberg is the first person in the Administration to take action that responds to the bitterness felt by Americans toward government enabling Wall Street executives to reap millions of dollars in pay after they have caused the ruination of the economy. This resentment could possibly deepen as the recession hangs on and the dollars and cents concerns of voters dominate the 2010 elections – more so than Afghanistan or health care.

When Feinberg says the government will “order” reductions in pay to executives of bailed out companies, it represents the first time anyone associated with the Obama administration has used such a verb. In New York a few days ago, President Obama’s message to Wall Street was: “I would ask that you join us” in reforming Wall Street practices. Last Sunday on the ABC news show This Week the President’s closest political advisor David Axelrod, when asked about the Wall Street bonuses, said: “we have, as I said, limited sway other than moral suasion with some of these – a lot of these institutions.”

Feinberg is someone who is more adept at using the law to achieve a specific goal than relying on an “ask:” or an appeal to one’s sense of morality. He has a reputation as a tough negotiator who knows Wall Street but is not a person of Wall Street.

As the press secretary for the House Judiciary Committee at the same time that Feinberg was running Kennedy’s Senate Judiciary Committee, I noticed that staffers on the committees would call him Senator Feinberg behind his back – sometimes jealously, but always with an acknowledgement of some truth to the label.

Ted Kennedy, being secure and smart, promoted this because it made him a more effective senator. Since Kennedy trusted Feinberg’s skills and integrity the Senator could be several places at once and get more done.

Today, over 30 years later, Obama is indicating the same type of confidence in Feinberg. The announcements this week by the pay czar represent just the beginning of reforms on executive pay. Perhaps most importantly, they start to move away from the idea that Wall Street will – or even should – be moved by moral suasion. Stephen Labaton reports for the New York Times that the federal government asked the insurance industry to repay $45 million dollars in bonuses, and so far only $19 million has been paid back. I am surprised that it is as high as $19 million. You cannot blame Wall Streeters for being greedy — they are in the business of making money. That is what they do. It is up to the government to keep them honest through tough regulation and oversight.

Much more is needed than Feinberg’s first step. In June I posted an idea that would apply a direct correction to Wall Street bonuses. Under my proposal, corporations that pay their top executives bonuses while the companies are losing money would be required to pay the federal government a tax worth ten times the bonus. It is a conservative idea, to incentivize sound business practices. It might have made a number of corporations think twice before handing out bonuses last year. For example, AIG gave $38 million to top executives while it was losing $99 billion, and Citigroup handed out $60 million in bonuses while it was losing $18 billion.

After months of hearing Larry Summers and Tim Geithner make excuses for the government’s failure to force reforms on executive pay, Ken Feinberg is a breath of fresh air. We can only hope that he takes an increasing role in the Treasury Department’s dealings with Wall Street, to the point where the Summers and Geithner acolytes begin to refer to him as Secretary Feinberg.

When President Harry Truman said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” he had not met any of the Blue Dog Democrats in the Senate.

Blue Dog senators Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and other Democrats such as Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who face reelection next year, have a choice-do they run as Obama Democrats or Obama critics?

They may look at the latest polls and think that the road to reelection points to the critic’s role, but recent history shows that if you are a senator who criticizes a president of your own party, you are more likely to help your senate opponent than yourself.

If the Senate Democrats who must face the voters in 2010 oppose Obama on health care, continue to voice second thoughts over the stimulus bill they helped to pass, and say “no” to more programs to help people get back to work, they may help to create more doubts about Democratic leadership in general. This will damage the President and their own reelections. Ask Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Mike DeWine of Ohio who ran and lost campaigns in which they tried to separate themselves from President George Bush.

If Democratic senators run with – instead of against – Obama’s agenda, they will have a better opportunity to get their message across. If the President’s approval is declining, or the economy is faltering, Democrats could speak with one voice and admit the difficulties, look for positive developments to highlight, and make the alternative unacceptable. If the doubting Blue Dogs are looking for a winning example, they can find it in the Republican senate campaigns of 1982.

President Ronald Reagan’s troubles two years into his presidency were not unlike the problems facing president Obama. Reagan, like Obama, swept into office with a mandate to change the policies of a failed predecessor. Like Obama, Reagan had a healthy majority in the Senate with which to create the Reagan Revolution of smaller government, lower tax rates, and less regulation of business.

Reagan, like Obama, moved quickly to try to make great advances in a short period of time. He cut federal programs and taxes and installed a tight money policy, which choked investment but began to get inflation under control. The result was the 1981-82 recession that put millions more Americans out of work. Disapproval of the new president, particularly of his policies, began to rise not long after his inauguration. Reagan’s popularity surged in March after he was shot (71% approved in March 1981), then tumbled downward for over a year (60% in July 1981 and below 50% in 1982).

This compares to an 11 point dip for Obama in the last seven months, from 66% approval in January, to 57% in ABC’s August survey.

As Reagan’s popularity dipped in ‘81 and ‘82, so did his popularity in the Senate. Many of the Senators – starting with Majority Leader Howard Baker from Tennessee – were not Reagan revolutionary soldiers who believed in supply side economics. Nonetheless, Reagan used his powers of persuasion and his image of strong leadership that stood for values we all share, to convince the Senators up for reelection in 1982 to fight the Democrats on Reagan’s battlefield, not their own individual state grounds. They embraced a national campaign message around Reagan’s ideas, even if they did not entirely believe in the whole program.

I remember one day in 1982 I was with my boss, Rep. Peter Rodino, Democrat from New Jersey, at an event at the Supreme Court, and we met up with Howard Baker, who wanted to discuss the Reagan proposal of a constitutional amendment to require the federal government to always have a balanced budget. This, of course would be a disaster as a practical matter, but conservatives loved it and were pushing very hard for it, with millions of petitions flooding Capitol Hill. Baker said, “Peter, I know this is a bad deal, but it is like a big wave that I cannot stop. I am going to let it just wash over me.”

Despite their misgivings, the Senate Republicans nationalized the campaign in 1982, blaming the economic mess on President Carter and asserting that they were finally getting a handle on inflation.

On Election Day 1982, the nation suffered under 10% unemployment, yet the Senate Republicans ended the day without any net loss in the Senate – an unusual occurrence for a bi-election year. A relatively large number of non-ideological Republicans, many of whom were tagged as vulnerable, tied themselves to Reagan and won: Senators like Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, William Roth of Delaware, Richard Lugar of Indiana, David Durenberger of Minnesota, John Danforth of Missouri, and John Heinz of Pennsylvania.

So before the Democratic Senators who are up for reelection in 2010 and 2012 decide to strike out on their own and give up on President Obama’s ambitious agenda for America, remember that the presidency casts a long shadow – the Democrats in the Senate can help themselves more by helping Obama lead by than nipping at his heals and doing what the Senate does best, slow down progress.

The epilogue to the Republican story in 1982 is that the recession was harsh but short-lived, Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker successfully defeated inflation and, although the economy was not healthy by the next election, it was healthy enough to allow Hal Riney, Reagan’s talented San Francisco media guru to create ads that told us that in 1984 -”It’s morning again in America…why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” Take a lesson, Blue Dogs and other Democrats.

from Bjorn J via Creative Commons

These days, the tail that wags the dog in Congress is colored blue.

The so-called Blue Dog Democrats are not a majority of the House of Representatives. They are not even a majority of the Democrats. But they are tugging so hard on the reins of the majority that they are determining the direction of heath care reform.

Think of the 52 Democrats in the House of Representatives who call themselves Blue Dogs as Darwinian creatures of politics – descendants of a pest called the boll weevil that infested Congress in the 1980’s.

Russonello’s political dictionary defines a “Blue Dog” as: “a congressional animal that barks incessantly about saving the taxpayers money while quietly carrying water for policies that increase the federal deficit and the national debt.”

The most important thing to Blue Dogs – about half of them come from Southern states – is presenting themselves to their local news media and their constituents as fiscal conservatives in order to send the message that they are a different kind of Democrat – code for not too liberal.

The Blue Dogs feed on a special brand of “fiscal conservatism,” which claims to spend less of taxpayers’ money but in reality merely shifts what the government’s money is spent on and who pays. Their ancestors, the boll weevils, worked against any spending in the 1980s that was not a weapons system.

They had a large impact on government and our country:

By the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term in office in 1988, spending on domestic needs such as health care; child nutrition; economic programs to help create jobs, build housing and educate our children; medical and scientific research; and everything else except entitlements and defense, dropped from 20.1% to 14.8% of the federal budget. Congress, with the boll weevils leading the way, found the money to increase military spending from $158 billion in 1981 to $291 billion in 1988, and spending on the military rose from 23.3% to 27.3% as a proportion of the federal budget. These fiscal conservatives were responsible for the budget deficit increasing from $79 billion to $155 billion during the Reagan years (1981 to 1988).

Taxes on the wealthiest Americans dropped to their lowest rate in decades (from a top marginal rate of 69.125% to 28%). The interest on the federal debt reached $12.65 billion every month.

Today, the Blue Dogs have health care reform by the neck. They intone ominously about their fears of a high price tag on President Obama’s plan for comprehensive health care. Then they oppose provisions that will save money for health care consumers and for the federal government. Specifically, they oppose a strong public option because it would be too difficult for private insurance companies to compete against – in other words it would provide quality care at less cost. They are also willing to draw a line in the sand to block health care reform if it includes new taxes on businesses or millionaires.

They dubbed President Obama’s stimulus package as “too costly,” but gave President Bush an open check book to wage war in Iraq. Their reasoning seems to be that many of them came from traditionally Republican districts, so they need to act like Republicans.

If the President loses meaningful health care reform because of the Blue Dogs, he has his chief of staff to blame. Many of the current Blue Dogs were recruited by Rahm Emanuel when he served as chairman of the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He believes they are the key to the Democrats holding the majority in the House because only the pro-insurance company, pro-millionaire type of Democrat can get elected in these districts.

This type of thinking is part of the reason why people tell us in focus groups that it doesn’t matter who wins elections, because “they are all the same in Washington.” Voters legitimately ask: why should we work for the Democrats to win a majority in Congress if they are not willing to make real changes from what the Republicans offered?

Nothing will test this assumption more powerfully than the outcome of health care reform.

Now that we have reached the end of the hearings on Judge Sonya Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, someone in the Senate should state the obvious – Supreme Court hearings serve no constructive purpose and should be retired. They are just one more embarrassing spectacle produced by America’s most exclusive club.

Before the hearings began, the news media reported the details of Sotomayor’s character and her rise from the Bronx projects to the Ivy League, then back to her New York home to serve the public as a prosecutor and judge. Legal analysts filled the news pages and websites with long analytical pieces about her opinions and most agreed that her judicial record showed intelligence, adherence to the law, and impartial judgments. Journalists also covered her past speeches, and exposed her consistent predilection for giving speeches that were anything but impartial. We knew all of this before Senator Pat Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, gaveled the start of the Senate daytime television drama.

So what did we learn from the hearings?

• We found out that Sonya Sotomayor is as adept as John Roberts at speaking with a deliberate, intelligent-sounding tone while not answering questions.
• We were impressed that she looks as authoritative in her red suit and her royal blue suit as Roberts did in his navy suits. She seems sartorially ready to put on the robes of a Supreme Court justice.
• We were reassured that her mom loves her, as the elderly woman looked as sincere as Roberts’ family tableau on the front row in back of the witness.
• We were entertained by Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer of New York who gushed about the judge’s heroic personal story.
• We were puzzled and annoyed by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina who worried out loud about the content of Sotomayor’s speeches, suggesting that the speeches were of equal importance to her judicial rulings.
• And if that was not enough, the television audience had the opportunity to hear Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, ask tough questions such as “What would you like history to say about you when all is said and done?” Klobuchar pointed out that she was just copying the exact wording that Republican senators asked nominees Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Okay, okay, the hearings have no useful purpose. But what harm can they do? Lots.

I am convinced that if the Senate had calmly and carefully studied Clarence Thomas’ record in 1991, away from the spectacle of televised hearings in which Thomas angrily accused the white Senators of conducting a “hi-tech lynching,” the Senate would have found his qualifications lacking and he would not be on the Supreme Court today. The Thomas hearings turned out to be the Anita Hill hearings, with Republican Senators putting her on trial. Then Senator Joe Biden, who chaired the hearings, allowed the process to be about almost anything except Thomas’ qualifications.

Public opinion research we have conducted over the past five years indicates the public takes the Senate’s role in the confirmation of Supreme Court justices more seriously than do many Senators. Majorities of Americans believe the Senate and the public have a right to know the nominee’s views on Constitutional issues and to learn about prior rulings and legal opinions. The public does not like lifetime appointments, but since that is the reality of the Supreme Court, Americans want the Senate to do a thorough job of interviewing someone who is applying for a lifetime job, from which he or she cannot be fired.

This does not require televised hearings. President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Robert Bork to be a Supreme Court judge in 1987 is a good example of why we do not need hearings. Although the argumentative Bork made for great television drama, all of the objections to Bork were already displayed in his rulings as a federal judge and in his legal writings. The momentum for the Senate’s thumbs down on Bork began the minute he was announced. The hearings process just made it all tackier.

Nothing useful is gleaned from these hearings that could not be obtained better by having the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate and studiously consider the record of Supreme Court nominees, then present their reasoning in speeches in committee and on the Senate floor. In this way, the Senate and the public can focus on the nominee’s judicial qualities rather than his or her communication skills. Without hearings, we are more likely to judge a nominee’s fidelity to the Constitution than his or her ability to spin.

The process of public hearings on Supreme Court nominees is a relatively new phenomenon, born in the 1950’s, around the same time television was entering American households. It is ironic that the Senate, an institution that too often lives in the past, is not well served by using the media tools of the present.

The Senate would do well to go back to a process when Supreme Court nominees were considered, not put on display.

The recent surveys on health care reform have been reporting large-scale support for reforming our health care system but no consensus on the specifics.

• The latest New York Times/CBS poll (June ‘09) reports 85% of the American public wants either “fundamental changes” (51%) or to “completely rebuild” our health care system.
• A June survey by the Pew Research Center found 71% favoring either fundamental changes (30%) or to completely rebuild (41%) the health care system in America.
• A June survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 68% of Americans favor “creating a public heath care option similar to Medicare to compete with private health insurance plans.”

The dissonance between this broad support for reform and the reservations about the specifics of reform, shown in some polls, lead some analysts to voice skepticism that health care legislation will pass this year. Others point to polls showing that the public is generally satisfied with the quality and cost of their own health care right now, so where is the impetus for reform? Indeed, the latest Pew numbers show that majorities of Americans do not have a “major problem” with “paying for the cost of routine medical care” (65%), “paying for the cost of health insurance” (56%), or the “quality of medical care in your community.” (73%).

If you only consider the numbers showing satisfaction with the current scene, you will not understand why seven to eight in ten Americans want Congress to pass health care reform. Talk to ordinary Americans, however, and the answer is clear – it is the insecurity Americans feel about health care and their future.

When pollsters have asked about motivations, the results are revealing. The Washington Post/ABC News poll in June asked a question that begins to explain why people are calling for reform, even if they say things are ok at the moment: the Post/ABC survey found 85% of Americans are concerned about “you and your family’s health care costs in the future.” 59% said very concerned and 25% were somewhat concerned.

Along these lines, it might also be a good idea to find out how many Americans worry about:

• If someone in my family becomes very ill, our insurance will drop us from coverage.
• If someone in my family gets cancer or some other serious illness, our insurance will not cover all the costs. Could this put me at risk of bankruptcy?
• If I lose my job, I will lose my health coverage and I will not be able to afford to buy new health insurance and pay all my other bills.
• If I lose my job or if I change jobs, I will not be able to get health insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

A broad inquiry into the strongest currents behind health care reform needs to measure the insecurity that we all hear expressed every day in our lives. To what degree are Americans scared to get sick, scared to leave a job, or worried about a family member because of the way health care is administered?

The latest polls showing that President Obama is more popular than some of his policies are a sure sign that meaningful health care reform with a public option should be a slam dunk for Obama.

The intangibles of leadership, not the specifics of policies, usually determine whether or not the country will accept large scale change like health care reform.

If Franklin Roosevelt had lived through his fourth term in office, the country would have heard him call for national health insurance as part of a Second Bill of Rights he was preparing. After FDR’s death, President Harry Truman took the first step by calling on Congress to provide universal health care coverage. But in 1945, Truman was not popular, and the American Medical Association and others crushed Truman’s plan.

Twenty years later, President Lyndon Johnson had just won a landslide election and he enjoyed a national consensus behind his leadership. He move quickly in January of 1965 to ask Congress to send him a Medicare bill. He faced the same bitter opposition as Truman, as the AMA fought back hard with lobbyists and money. The AMA even offered an alternative it named Bettercare, a voluntary program run by the private insurance companies. None of this mattered in the face of LBJ’s popularity. Just 204 days after LBJ asked for a Medicare bill, he signed it into law on July 30, 1965, in Independence, Missouri with former President Truman at his side.

President Obama’s personality and style of leadership is polar opposite that of LBJ. Yet, Obama has the same level of trust at a time of hope and anticipation that he will accomplish great things for the country.

Obama’s consistently high job approval ratings — 65% in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll — reflect the public’s general trust in his leadership. This high level of trust is much more important than the fact that somewhat fewer Americans like his specific policies.  For example:

• 61% approve of the way Obama is handling foreign affairs
• 57% approve of his handling of the threat of terrorism
• 56% approve of his handling of the economy
• 53% approve of how he is handling health care

President Clinton’s health care reform did not unravel due to the details of his plan as much as the public doubts about his leadership and voters’ disgust at Congressional behavior. The infamous “Harry and Louise” ads did not focus on the particulars of the president’s plan as much as they argued that something as important as your personal health could not be entrusted to the government at a time when Clinton had stumbled during his first year in office and Congressmen were bouncing checks and playing the float at the House Bank.

Although the history of health care reform covers decades of defeats, the level of trust the public has for Obama should make health care reform achievable.

Yet, there are some things he can do to lose:

• He can lose if he relies on men and women of good faith to come together to do what is right for the country. For the insurance, hospital, medical and trial attorney lobbies, health care reform is about money, and they will oppose every dollar they are asked to sacrifice for the common good.

• He can lose if he depends on selling the details.  Flow charts did more to hurt than help the Clinton plan’s presentation to the public. The devil is not in the details, it is in his determination. If the issue is reduced to one of who do you trust: the President or the insurance industry, who do you think will win?

• He can lose if he talks more about how he will pay for the plan rather than how we will benefit. Obama’s best line so far on health care has been “we cannot afford not to do it.” He must describe for us the pay-off, not the process of how to get there.

Like LBJ, Obama has the opportunity to either convert or roll over the naysayers and enact a program that will benefit hundreds of millions of Americans for years to come.

Health care reform is his to lose.