Before departing, I will thank those who made it possible for me to blog here.  They know who they are, but you don’t. They are Lewis Dvorkin, Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Kashmir Hill, and Andrea Spiegel. And of course, I should thank you dear readers. I failed to respond to many of your post, and yet you kept reading. You should take a bow, virtual or otherwise.

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

In May, I wrote that Democrats likely would keep control of the House because their leadership has been politically competent. I still stand by that analysis. Certainly Speaker Pelosi and her team have been more astute than Speaker Hastert and his cohorts were in 2006, which admittedly is a low bar to claim.

Yet I will concede an obvious point: I ought to have qualified my conclusion more than I did.

I should have noted that Pelosi and co. made passing health care reform more difficult than necessary by passing the bill in the House before the Senate. By going that route, she ensured that House Democrats would be forced to take a tough vote on the public option, which progressives like but conservatives and many independents loathe.

And certainly I should have noted, as Paul Kane and Shailagh Murray did today, that Pelosi relived the 1993 BTU-tax debacle by passing cap and trade in the House without getting assurance that the Senate would even take the bill up for a vote. Voting for a carbon tax will not play well in the Rust Belt, states that have been hit hard by the recession and are the home of manufacturing plants (though a version of the bill seeks to exempt such plants). As Kane and Murray wrote of Pelosi’s political maneuvering,

Pelosi won over wavering Democrats such as Boccieri and Reps. Mary Jo Kilroy (Ohio), Baron P. Hill (Ind.) and Zack Space ((Ohio) — each of whom faces a difficult reelection — after intense negotiations designed to soften the blow of the initial proposal. The House bill would place new production costs on power plants, factories and oil refineries, requiring U.S. emissions to decline 17 percent by 2020. Creating a commodities market, the bill would require polluters to buy “credits” to cover their emissions; Midwestern farmers, among others, could sell “offsets” for pollutants they didn’t emit.

But lofty talk about the securing the future of the planet is not likely to win over many voters who have lost their jobs.

In Boccieri’s northeastern Ohio district, the manufacturing decline has been sharp and painful. Ten years ago, there were 45,000 manufacturing jobs in the Canton-Massillon region. By spring, the number had been cut nearly in half, to 24,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Boccieri said he knows his constituents are focused on the present. “All the average voter wants to know is, ‘When my refrigerator is on, are my rates going to be lower or higher?’ “

I continue to think that the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans are all but guaranteed to take over the House is wrong. Let’s see if the GOP can put up a sufficient number of strong, well-funded challengers. I’m doubtful. But hey, in politics anything can happen in three months.

Image via Wikipedia

 Ross Douthat doesn’t like the American meritocracy. Like Christopher Lasch and Front Porch Republic, he believes that it is intellectually conformist, saps local communities of their intellectual vitality, and prevents rival power centers from emerging. He just doubts that dethroning or overthrowing it is possible:

[C]entralization is very difficult to roll back … some sort of broad national elite is probably here to stay, and … given those premises it may make more sense to create more room for real diversity within that elite — by holding meritocracy to its professed ideals — than to hope vainly for a localist revolution that undercuts the ruling class’s political and cultural authority …

This sounds to me like pessimism disguised as realism. Rolling back centralization is difficult, but less so than this paragraph assumes. Until the economic crisis, federal spending as a share of GDP had declined since 1980. Individual federal tax rates are lower than 30 years ago. Yes, Uncle Sam is fighting more wars today than three decades ago and everyone is connected to a computer. But as recent history suggests, centralization has hardly been an unstoppable force. It can and has been stopped and reversed.

The more interesting question to me is whether the national elite that Ross identifies, the meritocratic elite, should be opposed. (His analysis of our elite, as well as that of Angelo Codevilla and Andrew Sullivan, equates the meritocratic elite with the entire American elite. In fact, as Nicholas Lemann showed, there are two other elites in America vying with the meritocrats). For Catholics, I think the answer is yes.

Look at what the last four decades of American history have wrought. Catholics once ran the country. They controlled the Democratic Party. They controlled the big cities. And they controlled Hollywood. Today Catholics run none of those institutions.

Guess who overthrew them? The meritocrats did. Sure, the talents helped take away Catholics’ control of the big cities. And more importantly, American Catholicism has withered for institutional and intellectual reasons. Yet the meritocrats played a major role. The result, though beneficial to many Jews and women, has been to make America a more secular and socially liberal country.

If American Catholics want to restore the best parts of the old order, such as that existed in the mid-sixties, when blacks had achieved civil rights and popular culture brought lowbrow and highbrow together, they should consider taking on the meritocrats.  Some American Catholic leaders, perhaps most notably Bishop David O’Connell, the former president of Catholic university, recognized the moral problems of meritocracy and rebuilt Catholic institutions accordingly. Others have only their mortarboards from elite schools and hosannas from the meritocratic class to lose.

In the immediate policy case, Democrats are going so far as to subsidize more unemployment. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So if you pay people not to work, they often decide . . . not to work. Or at least to delay looking or decline a less than perfect job offer, holding out for something else that may or may not materialize.

The editorial cited the work of three economists to bolster its case, but let me discuss their findings later. The key sentence in this paragraph is the following: “If you subsidize something, you get more of it.” That’s the heart of the editorial page’s argument. Everything flows from that statement. Yes, that assertion is qualified, but it is also restated in the final paragraph, the editorial criticizing the Obama administration for “paying people not to work.”

“If you subsidize something, you get more of it” sounds like a strong argument. It’s simple and clear. But stop to think whether it’s true. Certainly professional baseball and basketball players today are compensated much more handsomely today, as are many artists (authors, musicians, actors) Yet are baseball players superior to their counterparts in the 1950s and ‘60s or writers better than those of the 1920s? Few would argue that they are. Or let’s use an analogy of quantity rather than quality. Certainly the federal government spends more money on defense today, as a share of its budget, than it did during the height of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Yet does Uncle Sam have more troops than it did then or more defense broadly defined? The answer is not so simple.

In the case of unemployment benefits, the link between them and more joblessness is not ironclad. The WSJ editorial cited the recent findings of JP Morgan analyst Michael Feroli to conclude that extending jobless aide increases the jobless rate by 1.5 percentage points. But recent history does not support this claim. As the WSJ reported, the jobless rate in June actually fell in most states, a drop that occurred at a time when jobless benefits are relatively generous. Going back further in time, The Economist noted a similarly weak correlation:

Of the 47 weeks in emergency benefits enacted during this recession, only 20 of them had been passed into law by late 2009, at which point the unemployment rate was plateauing. Since the last 27 week extension, the unemployment rate has actually ticked downward. It therefore doesn’t make sense to argue that emergency unemployment benefit extensions can be blamed for 1.5% of the increase in the unemployment rate from 5% to 10.1%.

Granted, few economists argue that extending jobless benefits lowers the jobless rate. But debates about unemployment benefits are really a sideshow. The problem with the economy is not weak labor supply. It’s weak labor demand. Few employers are hiring. As Scott Winship wrote,

So as I’ve been following the debate about unemployment insurance and whether it actually worsens the unemployment rate, I’ve actually been open to the idea that being able to receive benefits for up to two years might create perverse incentives.  The research is not as uniformly dismissive of the idea as some liberal assessments have implied (go to NBER’s website and search the working papers for “unemployment” if you want to check this out yourself).

In particular, the idea that there were 5 people looking for work for every job opening struck me as sounding overly alarmist.  So I started looking into the numbers to determine whether I thought they were reliable.  The figures folks are using rely on a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which unfortunately only goes back to December of 2000.  But the Conference Board has put out estimates of the number of help wanted ads since the 1950s.  Through mid-2005, the estimates were based on print ads, as far as I can tell, but the Conference Board then switched to monitoring online ads.  You can find the monthly figures for print ads here and the ones for online ads here.  The JOLT and unemployment figures are relatively easy to find at BLS’s website.

When I graphed the two Conference Board series (which requires some indexing to make them consistent–the print ad series being an index pegged to 1987 while the online series gives the actual number of ads) against the number of unemployed, and then the JOLT series against the unemployed, here’s what I found:

I’ll just say I was shocked and that I am much more sympathetic to extension of unemployment insurance than I was yesterday.

Winship’s argument undercuts the conclusions of Lawrence Katz and Raj Chetty, the two Obama-friendly economists that the WSJ cited as proof of intellectual duplicity. Winship shows that this economy really is bad for workers. In fact, it’s the worst since the 1950s at least.

The WSJ editorial makes a persuasive and clear case. Its arguments just happen to be off base.

Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who reportedly will buy the team, would seem to be the last person to ground the franchise in the community. He took over companies, including that of a friend’s, and kicked most of their employees to the curb. He is nobody’s idea of Mr. Nice Guy; in fact, he is my idea of Mr. Mean (and no, that Mr. Mean). He loves yachting. Photographs often feature him scowling. And he is mega-billionaire.

And yet, like the Chronicle’s great Peter Hartlaub, I think Elllison could revive our beloved and woebegone Warriors. As Hartlaub writes,

The greatest friend of a sports fan is an incredibly rich owner with a huge ego who gets angry easily, takes defeat personally and loves living in the region. Larry Ellison with his Oracle billions is an incredible five-for-five. It’s like genetic scientists created this man to own the Warriors, combining Mark Cuban’s enthusiasm for sports, Paul Allen’s money and Genghis Khan’s instinct to behead anything that gets in his way. Best of all, this is a guy who appears to have spent much of his life motivated by vengeance. And if the late George Steinbrenner taught us nothing, vengeance wins championships.

Hartlaub makes a bunch of good suggestions to improve the franchise, such as not moving the team to San Francisco, its original Bay Area home, and bringing back Greg Papa. (No, Papa is not well known nationally, but the local reference is unavoidable). In this spirit, I will offer two more suggestions:

Change the name to the Oakland Warriors. Just saying the name feels good. It’s poetic and weirdly appropriate. Even more important, this new name would ground the team in the city in which it plays all of its games. This isn’t the the 1960s and ’70s. The team is no longer playing in San Diego, Palm Springs, or San Francisco. (The team actually played in two different venues in The City, at the Cow Palace and the Civic Auditorium, a situation that made it difficult for even die-hard fans like my dad to wonder where the hell was playing that night). It plays in Oakland. The team’s new name should reflect that reality.

Bring back kids hoops at halftime. As I mentioned earlier, the atmosphere at Warriors game before the game and at halftime resemble nothing so much as that of a sexed-up jazz nightclub. The band strikes up, the singer belts out her tunes, and the Floridians-ball-girls-cum-Warriors Girls do their thing. Yes, the Bay Area is a haven for singles, but the region at night is not one big lounge. Plenty of couples have children, so let local kids run around at halftime on the court and hoop it up like they once did. Unless my memory is faulty, fans got a big kick out of seeing 10- and 12-year-old boys and girls steal the ball, go up for a lay up, miss, and repeat the whole scenario. Basketball was brought back to its roots. So should the Warriors franchise.

– (Catholic?) teens in Northern Ireland riot

– David Brooks diagnoses our chief economic failure: appealing to princes rather than grinds

– Ross Douthat says conservatives should preach a new form of economic class warfare

– Jon Chait says the tragedy of David Brooks is that he’s a reporter not a logician

– via Rod Dreher, Arturo Vasquez says Catholicism needs to go pagan or die

– Jonathan Martin writes about the most WWF-like political ad of the year

– Author Gail Dines says looking at hard-core porn prevents young men from learning to share intimacy with women

– David Masciotra appreciates Springsteen of the 00’s

Image by Beverly & Pack via Flickr

Dan Balz argued in his column yesterday that the gubernatorial elections this fall will shape the course of American politics for the next decade. After all, the party in control of the governor’s mansion is in charge of congressional redistricting (in all but a few states) and is better able to help its presidential nominee. As Balz writes,

The Washington political community is understandably obsessed with the battle for control of Congress that will play out between now and November and the implications for how President Obama may govern in the second half of his first term. But no one at this weekend’s summer meeting of the National Governors Association underestimates the potentially greater significance of the outcomes in the states this fall.

Everything from implications for redistricting to 2012 presidential politics to contrasting styles of Republican and Democratic governance that will be put before the American people will be affected by what happens in the races for governor. As Nathan Daschle, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, put it, “It’s the most important gubernatorial election in a generation.”

Later in the story, Balz contends that presidential nominees can get elected based on which party controls a state’s governor’s mansion. Witness the influence that the GOP’s control of Ohio had in Bush’s win there in 2004 or the Democrats’ control of the big Midwestern states had in Obama’s victory two years ago.

I summarize Balz’s argument at length because it is an extended and dramatic version of a hoary bit of conventional political wisdom: congressional redistricting and gubernatorial control matter tremendously. Every pol and journalist believes that redistricting and winning the governor’s mansion are important. But Balz argues that the two factors have deep and long-term implications, as if they can shape a political tsunami (to use a trite phrase).

His argument sounds good. But really, it’s overstated in the extreme.

The main problem with Balz’s argument is a lack of historical data. He asserts that congressional redistricting shapes control of Congress and the White House with few examples to back them up. I went back and looked at which party controlled the most governorships in 1980, 1990, and 2000, and I found little evidence for his case.

Take 1990. Democrats that year controlled 29 of the 50 state governorships. Yet Republicans that decade swept into power in Congress, their first sustained control of the legislature since the 1920’s. Or take 2000. Republicans that year held 30 governor’s mansions, while Democrats had a mere 18. Yet Democrats seized back control of the House four years ago, by margins far larger than Republicans’.

Balz’s examples of gubernatorial elections shaping presidential ones are only a bit more peruasive. Yes, the fact that a Republican was governor of Ohio in 2004 might have helped Bush win that state and the election. But tons of other factors were also important. Where is the evidence that Ohio’s Republican governor, Bob Taft, mobilized supporters on Bush’s behalf? That’s the key question. After all, the Democratic governor of West Virginia did not put Al Gore over the top in that state in 2000, harming Gore’s chances of winning the presidency. And does anybody believe that if Republicans had controlled the governorships in the big Midwestern states in 2008, Obama would have been defeated?

I’m not saying that who controls the governor’s mansion isn’t important in congressional and presidential politics. It is important. It helped George W. Bush win Florida in 2000 and it helped Republicans gain three seats in Texas in 2004.

But the notion that the outcome of gubernatorial elections decide congressional and presidential elections is a political cliche. It sounds convincing and stated solemnly enough, it can override critical thought. Just consider the last decade. Who controlled the statehouses mattered less than the fact that a certain presidential counselor believed that carrying out big, partisan initiatives was the key to a president winning re-election.

If memory serves, the 2008 campaign contained minimal discussion of whether Obama or McCain could govern. There was no clamor for the candidates to detail how their responses, say, to Hurricane Katrina would have differed from President Bush’s.

What discussion there was among party and ideological activists would not have impressed a typical American 30 or 50 years ago. On the left, the fact that Obama ran a successful political campaign or wasn’t George W. Bush was trumpeted as evidence that he could govern a nation of 300 million people effectively. On the right, the fact that McCain piloted an airplane was viewed as proof of his governing bona fides.

Americans weren’t always as blase about the importance of governing. In 1960, Kennedy and Nixon debated heatedly about whether or not the U.S. should deploy missiles to protect Quemoy and Matsu, two Taiwanese-controlled islands off the coast of China. The outcome of the Cold War did not exactly hinge on the fate of the tiny islands, but the debate showed that Americans cared about the candidates’ ability to govern well.

Our political class also nominated candidates with a proven track record of governing. Franklin D. Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for eight years. Truman served as an artillery officer in World War I. Eisenhower successfully invaded Europe, becoming the first person to do so since William the Conqueror in 1066. Kennedy had captained a torpedo boat in World War II and saved most of his crew after their boat was sunk, though Kennedy didn’t see himself as a hero. Nixon had been Vice President. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush had been governors. And though Carter and Bush either didn’t last long in their jobs or had little power as governor, they had more experience governing than Obama or McCain did.

The professionalization of politics is part of the problem, as Alan Ehrenhalt noted in 1991’s The United States of Ambition. As late as the fifties or mid-sixties, Congress met from January to June. Now it meets the year round or close to it. The result is that members of Congress become more independent and self protective and less deferential and unified.

James Carville said that if the oil spill had occurred in Long Island Sound, the President and press would have demanded a quicker and more effective clean up. His claim might be true. Certainly the response to 9/11 in New York and Washington has been thorugh if not perfect. But NYC, as one of the country’s two most powerful cities, is a special case. Of course, the press and government would demanded a clean up of an environmental disaster there.

In cities not named New York, it seems fair to conclude, we citizens need to demand that government fix problems. Tocqueville gave us this advice more than 150 years ago. Isn’t it time we start learning it today?

[A]lthough Obama has to this point headlined only a handful of fund-raising events dedicated to House members, Biden has happily attended more than 15 of them, with more on the calendar. This is partly because the loquacious vice president has yet to meet the podium he doesn’t want to fling himself upon, but also because, in a lot of the more conservative, working-class districts in the South and Midwest, Obama’s approval ratings are considerably lower than they are in national surveys. In these parts of the country, Biden — plain-talking, profane and nobody’s idea of a closet Muslim — may not only be a more enthusiastic partisan than the president but a more persuasive one as well.

At first blush, the idea of Joe Biden stumping for Democrats in white-working class districts sounds like a good one. Who could be better than the Man from Scranton? But read the new report by Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, and think again.

The Greenberg-Bolger study examined House races in 70 districts considered up for grabs this fall. It found, not surprisingly, that Obam is unpopular; a mere two in five respondents said they approved of his job as president. It also found, more importantly, that his administration’s signature policies are deeply unpopular. Consider this factoid:

By 57 to 37 percent, voters in these 60 Democratic seats believe that President Obama’s economic policies have produced record deficits while failing to slow job losses — and not averted a crisis or laid a foundation for future growth.

Yes, voters in the 70 swing districts (another 10 districts are represented by Republicans) approve of financial reform. And yes, more of these voters blame former President Bush than President Obama for the Great Recession; in Bai’s story, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used a two-word phrase to describe the economy that Obama inherited that fans of “Spinal Tap” would instantly recognize.

But for dozens of Democrats, the overall picture looks bleak. In the 30 most competitive districts held by a Democrat, Democrats are down 9 points (37 to 46). And in the 30 second most competitive districts held by a Democrat, Democrats are down 1 point (43 to 44).

If you were a Democrat in one of these districts, would you want Obama’s number two stumping on your behalf? This question is more than rhetorical. I put it to spokespersons for half a dozen House Democrats. Alas, none has gotten back to me. If they do, I will let you know.

For Democrats in dozens of swing districts this fall, the prospect of a member of the Obama administration campaigning for them is likely to go over as well as Laurie David showing up at Tipper Gore’s new place. The official would be persona non grata.  In fairness, no congressional Democrat is likely to run against the administration, in the manner of Southern and some Northern Democrats running against the policies of Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Congressional Democrats will just keep their distance from the administration, and be on the defensive when Republicans attack them for supporting the president, as is happening already in the Arkansas Senate race.

If the Greenberg-Bolger study is accurate, the political problem for the Obama administration is its big-spending ways. Americans, especially the ones in moderate districts, think Obama has run up the deficit without lowering the jobless rate. While this perception is only half of the economic picture, it is widely held.

Which is why congressional Democrats in swing districts are likely to turn not to Obama, Biden, or even Hillary, but good ‘ol Bill. What other politician, Democrat or Republican, restrained federal spending, lowered the deficit, and cut unemployment? Right about now it’s likely that the 60 House Democrats mentioned in the study are asking themselves the same question.

Sarah Palin gets all of the attention as a powerful kingmaker, or queenmaker in the case of this week’s elections. But another former politician has shown not only that he too is a kingmaker, but also a consigliere to the president.

Bill Clinton is far from being an obvious candidate to wield power in the Obama White House. By all accounts, the 42nd president resented the hell out of the Obama campaign’s suggestions during the 2008 Democratic primaries that he was playing the race card with his “fairy tale” remark and a racial analysis of South Carolina’s Democratic primary electorate . Although Obama paid a much-publicized visit to Clinton’s office in New York during the fall presidential campaign, Clinton had stayed away from public associations with Team Obama.

That changed in late May. Quelling months of speculation, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that it was Bill Clinton who offered Representative Joe Sestak an unpaid position on a federal advisory board if Sestak would agree not to run against Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary in May. Apparently Emanuel believed that nobody in the administration could convince Sestak to take a hike quite like Bill Clinton.

Emanuel would think that. He served as a top lieutenant in the Clinton administration. Now Emanuel is likely turning to Clinton to do more than prevent Democratic candidates from running for higher office. The former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel is likely turning to Clinton to help elect moderate and conservative Democrats this fall.

Clinton famously helped embattled Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas win her party’s nomination Tuesday. Less publicized, except by ABC’s Rick Klein, was Clinton’s role last month in helping Rep. Mark Crist defeat a strong Republican challenger in his western Pennsylvania district. Helping an incumbent senator win her nomination bid in your home state is one thing. Helping an unproven candidate in a socially conservative district is another.

I talked with two Clinton allies about his role in the elections this November, and both said that Clinton could help Democratic candidates appeal to moderate-to-conservative Democratic and independent voters.

“You look at where he did well in 1992 and 1996, and where his wife did well in 2008, and those are the areas where he’ll campaign if asked,” Ed Kilgore, a Democratic strategist and Clinton ally said in an interview. “Obviously (those will be) marginal districts in the South and in white-working-class districts outside the South, where the party is struggling right now.”

Arizona is one such state where Clinton’s appearances could help local Democrats. The Grand Canyon State, which Clinton carried in 1996, is likely to feature two competitive House races this fall. Former state Democratic party chairman Jim Pederson, who ran against  and lost narrowly to Republican Sen. John Kyl in 2006, remembers that Clinton stumped on his behalf twice, including one rally that attracted 10,000 people at Reid Park in Tucson. “He still has a lot of respect and admiration in the (Arizona Democratic) party,” Pederson said.

Left unsaid was that President Obama could not help moderate and conservative Democrats nearly as much as Clinton. How much Clinton can help Democratic candidates this fall is an open question. Certainly dozens of Democrats from moderate and conservative districts are endangered of losing this November.

Is the administration turning to Bill Clinton to help Democrats keep control of Congress this November? If it is, I can think of two big implications.

One implication is that the administration believes that the public considers its agenda to have been too liberal or progressive and that the former head of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council is one of the few politicos who can help bail them out.

The other is that Clinton is helping Obama not simply because he wants his wife to avoid the prospect of a divided Congress for the next two years.