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A Tribute to a Bush Appointee: Dana Gioia, Head of the National Endowment for the Arts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 CommentNot 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.
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Despite Charlie Rangel's Tax Problems, He Might Help Republicans Keep Bush's Tax Cuts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2008 Comment (21)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.
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Democrats Seem Unwilling to Deploy President-Elect Obama in Georgia Runoff
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (3)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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General Motors and the Citigroup Bailout
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (6)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.
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Higher Taxes on High Earners and Increased Unionization Didn't Work for FDR
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2008 Comment (4)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.
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Could an Undecided Coleman-Franken Race in Minnesota Help Chambliss in Georgia?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2008 Comment (6)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.
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Is the Immigration Wave Ebbing?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2008 Comment (5)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.
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Paulson, Bernanke, and Congress on the Bailout: Incompetence All Around
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (29)Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke got beaten up pretty badly in the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. And on at least one point, I think, justifiably so. In his opening statement, Paulson acknowledged that at the time the Senate passed its version of the financial rescue package October 1 and the House passed the same version October 3, he had already decided that the Treasury Department would not embark on the program of acquiring toxic securitized mortgage and other paper from financial institutions, as he was telling Congress it would, and that it would instead use powers in the bill to inject capital into banks and other financial institutions. I think members of Congress have standing to complain when they are asked to approve a piece of legislation on the grounds that the administration will do A, but in fact the administration has already decided to use the broad powers in the bill to do B—and hasn't told Congress about its change of mind. Paulson in his opening statement hit back at that by noting that in the two weeks Congress had been considering the legislation—from September 19, when Paulson and Bernanke presented their three-page rescue package outline to members of Congress, until October 3, when Congress passed the bill—the stock market fell 9 percent. In effect, he's blaming Congress for dithering while $2 trillion of wealth was being destroyed. He's got an argument, too.
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The Public Is Not Sold on the Detroit Three Bailout
Tweet Share on Facebook November 17, 2008 Comment (15)Here's my Creators Syndicate column on my ambivalent attitude toward government aid to the Detroit Three auto companies. For one who grew up in the Detroit area in the 1950s and 1960s, the plight of these companies is gut-wrenching and astonishing. I can't help imagining going back in a time capsule to that time and place and explaining to people what would happen 50 years later. It's like the thought I often have when I'm strapped in my seat and the plane is taking off: I wish I had Thomas Jefferson next to me so that I could explain (insofar as I understand it) how airplanes were working. The difference is that I imagine that Jefferson with his knack for cutting-edge machinery would have understood, while my 1950s Detroiters wouldn't.
The public is evidently not sold on the Detroit Three bailout. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that only 35 percent favor government aid, while 45 percent are opposed. Young voters are split, with 37 against it and 36 for it, while 27 percent remain unsure. And Americans apparently distinguish between the need to aid financial firms that provide credit vital to the economy and the need to help ailing manufacturing firms like the Detroit Three. A USAToday/Gallup poll showed that 47 percent of the public felt that "providing loans and other help" to the Detroit Three auto companies "is not very important." In contrast, 60 percent felt that setting new financial regulation was "critical" or "very important" for the economy.
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Obama's Organization Delivered Impressive Results Against McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook November 14, 2008 Comment (9)I have not had enough time to look closely at the election returns in all target states, much less all the 50 states. But my initial take on the returns in two neighboring states, Ohio and Indiana, shows an interesting contrast. Ohio was a target state in 2004 and 2000; Indiana wasn't but was this time. Indeed, from the 1970s up through 2004, Indiana has been in national elections much more Republican than the neighboring Great Lakes states. That changed in the 2006 off-year elections, when Democrats picked up three seats by impressive margins, and polls in the 2008 cycle indicated that Barack Obama was competitive there. As a result, the Obama campaign used its huge resources in money and manpower to make Indiana a target state.
Obama also carried Ohio 51 percent to 47 percent, a 3-percentage-point Democratic improvement over 2004, when George W. Bush carried it 50 percent to 48 percent (I am using the figures from Dave Leip's Election Atlas in all cases here). That's a 3-percentage-point Democratic gain and a 3-percentage-point Republican loss. Obama got 1 percent more popular votes than Kerry; McCain got 10 percent fewer popular votes than Bush. Overall turnout, as now reported, was down 4 percent. (I think this figure is a little fishy; with some votes still unreported; the numbers show overall turnout down between 31 percent and 44 percent in Marion, Tuscarawas, and Clinton counties.) It rose, at least according to these figures, in 13 of 88 counties, with the highest percentage rises in exurban counties where the population has been growing fastest (Delaware County outside Columbus, Warren County outside Cincinnati.)
