Entries for November 2008

Not many presidential appointees have served through most of the Bush presidency. (Not many will have served through his entire presidency, since the vetting and confirmation processes now take many months more than they should.) One who has is Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Please read this well-deserved tribute to Gioia's work from Thomas Hibbs of Baylor University. I have been particularly impressed by Gioia's efforts to encourage performances of Shakespeare's plays throughout the country.

It's looking like House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel is going to face an ethics committee investigation for, among other things, failing to report income on rental properties and supporting a tax law change favoring a big donor to an institute named after Rangel. I'm sorry to see this. I like Charlie Rangel, I think he's a decent person and a charming pol, and I'm inclined to cut him some slack because he served in the Korean War and survived some of the most horrific fighting that American men in arms have ever faced. I think it would be sad to see him lose the chairmanship of Ways and Means for sins which are more venial than mortal, just as I thought it was sad that his predecessor as chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, lost not only his chairmanship but also his seat in Congress and, for a while, his freedom for some small bits of chicanery that were dwarfed by his public policy achievements, notably in the enactment of the tax reform bill of 1986.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Polls in the Georgia runoff continue to show incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss with about the same small lead over Democrat Jim Martin that he had in the November 4 election. The realclearpolitics.com average, rounded off, is Chambliss 51 percent to 46 percent. By way of perspective, Chambliss beat incumbent Democrat Max Cleland in the considerably more Republican year of 2002 by a 53 percent-46 percent margin. Democrats hope for a disproportionately large turnout of young and black voters, but Barack Obama, busy building an administration with an eye to bipartisan acceptability, seems so far unwilling to deploy the one political asset—personal campaigning by the president-elect—that seems most likely to spark such turnout. I imagine there's some behind-the-scenes arguments among Democrats about whether Obama should (pardon the expression) march through Georgia. Bill Clinton's campaigning for incumbent Wyche Fowler in the 1992 runoff didn't help Clinton's prestige but rather signaled something in the way of political weakness, because Republican challenger Paul Coverdell won. I'm guessing that Obama wants to avoid a repeat of this outcome. And I'm guessing, with some basis, that at least some incumbent Democratic senators would rather not have 59 Democratic colleagues, lest they be put on the record for imposing policies like the abolition of secret ballots in union recognition elections.

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By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Alex Taylor of Fortune provides a very interesting long-term take on General Motors. The structure of the company has proved to be a liability for many decades, but Taylor makes it clear that different executives have had different effects—and that alternative paths might have been taken at several junctures. He also helps me to understand why the GM board has stuck with CEO Rick Wagoner, under whom the stock price has fallen from $75 to $3.

Eugene Ludwig, comptroller of the currency (that is, a leading bank regulator) during much of the Clinton administration, has a smart article on the Citigroup bailout and the need to quarantine toxic financial assets in an Resolution Trust Corp.-like structure, where vulture capitalists can buy them for low prices and try to get more value out of them. This was, as I understand it, the original thrust of the argument Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made for the TARP bill passed by Congress October 3, although by that time Paulson had apparently decided to rely on capital injections into the banks rather than purchase of toxic assets. We have to do both, Ludwig argues, and with the terms of the Citigroup rescue, we now are.

Tyler Cowen does us the signal service of reminding us which of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies worked and which didn't. Policies that didn't work include higher taxes on high earners (also a policy of Roosevelt's predecessor, Herbert Hoover) and increasing unionization (which helped some who held jobs but did nothing for or hurt those who didn't). The Detroit autoworkers who unionized in 1937 (by the way, through the sit-down strikes that were illegal then and now under any legal standard anyone has advanced) were not the most downtrodden of Americans at that time. More downtrodden were the unemployed in Detroit who would happily have taken those jobs at significantly lower wages.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson St. blog

Interesting numbers from Scott Rasmussen. The generic vote for Congress since the election shows much smaller margins for the Democrats than they enjoyed before the election. Are voters saying, "Hey, now that we see how many Democrats there are in Congress, we're not sure we want any more"? If so, that buttresses a finding in Rasmussen's poll on the Georgia Senate runoff between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. Rasmussen shows Chambliss ahead by 50 percent to 46 percent (which was actually the rounded off percentages in the November 4 election, with Chambliss barely under the 50 percent mark). In addition, 52 percent (including 9 percent of Martin voters) say they're less likely to vote for Martin if it will give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate. Only 38 percent say they are more likely. This suggests that Chambliss stands to do better (a) if the Minnesota race is decided for Democrat Al Franken on or before December 2 or (b) if the Minnesota winner is undetermined December 2 than (c) if Republican Norm Coleman is declared the winner by that time. Since it seems like the Minnesota race will not be decided until well after December 2, it looks like the don't-let-them-get-60 argument will help Chambliss.

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Blogger extraordinaire Mickey Kaus collects information that suggests that we are seeing a reversal of immigration, a gran salida of immigrants, surely many illegal, back to their countries of origin. Follow the links for the fascinating details. He sees a connection between tougher enforcement of immigration laws (including state laws) and the rejection of comprehensive immigration bills in 2006 and 2007 and an out-migration of immigrants. And a connection between that and the collapse of the housing bubble. All of this makes a lot of sense to me. We've seen a long trend of heavy Latino immigration, but trend lines don't go on forever. There's a break point somewhere. I'm going to be interested in seeing whether the Census Bureau's population estimates for June 30, 2008 (due out in December, I believe), show some concrete and significant evidence of this apparent trend. Here's a link to the relevant website.