AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. Buffet
NH Political Report: Ben Carson has no filter and sometimes that gets you in hot water
by Kevin Landrigan, nh1.com, October 2, 2015
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has no filter.
And because of that, it can make for entertaining and for the candidate, problems of his own doing.
Our latest example comes from his speech at the University of New Hampshire in Durham talking about how he and his friends would elude local cops growing up in Detroit.
"Sometimes the police would come always in unmarked cars, they would be chasing us across the field, so these tall fences, they were 10 feet tall, they didn’t know how adept we were at jumping over those fences," Carson chuckled.
So we would swing our feet over the fence and leap down to the ground all in one motion and laugh at them because they couldn’t do that. That was back in the day before they would shoot you.’’
The student audience laughed at the comments but Carson seemed to know he’d stepped in it.
"I’m just kidding, you would know they wouldn’t do that," Carson declared.
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It’s worked before and the Clintons are at it again hoping to take a big negative and turn it into a positive.
Let’s start with the obvious. Many of Hillary Clinton’s wounds are self-inflicted [-] the e-mail scandal, the hopelessly insular structure of her presidential campaign at the national level that has eased up a bit.
But both Bill and Hillary have proved over the years very adept at playing the victim.
That’s because often they have been.
This cycle is no different as the national GOP, the presidential candidates and all the Super PACS have a singular focus [-] torpedo Hillary’s candidacy.
Enter right wing conspiracy, take two.
We saw this played out first last Friday with Bill Clinton on CNN talking about how the GOP attack machine has "blown way out of proportion" all of his wife’s small stumbles regarding the e-mails with the national media has become an unwilling co-conspirator.
Then there’s David Brock, the award-winning author and liberal activist who cut his teeth in journalism as a conservative muckraker (His tell-all book was entitled, "Confessions of a Right Wing Hit Man.")
Brock is embarked on a 28-city tour promoting his latest book, "Killing The Messenger" about how the right-wing establishment has upped its ``A’’ game with new technology, old money and a renewed enthusiasm of Tea Party fervor.
But Brock’s agenda is clearly to further the Clinton narrative that once again Hillary is being pilloried unfairly.
Brock did tell NH1 News that the ``right wing conglomerate’’ as he liked ``The Atlantic’’ magazine name for it is very upset that self-financed, billionaire Donald Trump could become the GOP presidential nominee.
"The Koch Brothers aren’t happy because Donald Trump doesn’t need their money," Brock says.
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Brock does not believe the GOP establishment will ever tolerate Trump getting the brass ring but insists his former allies are ready to give up on their first choice, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
"They had such high hopes for him but what a colossal disappointment," Brock said.
Okay, if Bush isn’t going to make it where will they go?
Brock says Florida remains a must state for Republicans which makes the default from Bush an obvious one for the major GOP players.
"If Jeb is stalling the party might turn to Marco Rubio. He is getting a little bit of a lift in the polls and from what I hear the establishment is taking a second look at Marco Rubio,"Brock added.
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They come together when it comes to defending the first-in the-nation primary, but we saw again this week that when a threat emerges, leaders in both political parties can often lose the script.
Outgoing Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus stunned politicos in all the early states this week by telling the National Journal that after 2016 there are "no sacred cows" and no state should have a franchise on being first, second or third.
As far back as 2012, Priebus had advocated the idea of a rotating primary to have regions of the country take turns with getting a prime position. But the Wisconsin Republican always prefaced those comments with the caveat that the "carve outs" should keep their place - New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada.
But Priebus isn’t running for re-election after four terms as party chair and a week after his buddy, WI Gov. Scott Walker, flames out in his White House run, Priebus drops his support for the early goers.
Rather than get the band back together, Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley decided to put New Hampshire’s most prominent Republican on the spot.
"This is another example of Senator Kelly Ayotte failing to lead. What is she going to do about this?" Buckley declared.
Then there’s Republican State Chair Jennifer Horn who tried to minimize what Priebus said after having spoken to him while out of state at a party meeting.
"This is nothing more than the normal process we go through every four years," Horn said.
And she maintained the 2016 campaign will end up proving to GOP party elders how important it is to keep New Hampshire first.
"Consider the fact that someone like Carly Fiorina doesn’t come out of nowhere like she has without New Hampshire," Horn said.
Then the GOP leader offered her own partisan shot.
"I contrast the wide open, no holds barred primary we are having with the Democrats where the Governor Hassan, Senator Shaheen and every major figure in that party is trying to create a coronation for Hillary Clinton," Horn said.
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The horrific, tragic killings in Oregon do present a political opportunity for Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH.
Her critics likely remember in 2013 her vote against closing the loophole in federal criminal background checks attracted plenty of attacks including $2 million in ads from the Super PAC controlled by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
But what Ayotte reminds and got to repeat Friday was that her alternative the Mental Health First Aid Act got more than 90 votes in the Senate. This would have given officials more tools to identify people who are liable to engage in mass killings.
NH1 News was the first to report Ayotte making her renewed call for this reform.
"I am deeply saddened by the horrific tragedy at Umpqua Community College. While details surrounding this terrible incident are still forthcoming, we must do more to prevent violence before it occurs," Ayotte said.
"Earlier this year, I reintroduced the Mental Health First Aid Act, bipartisan legislation to expand mental health first aid training and help the public identify, understand, and address crisis situations safely."
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She had to wait a while but Gov. Maggie Hassan finally has her own "gotcha" when it comes to the state budget.
Yes, she’ll endure plenty of brickbats for her veto of the Republican-written state budget and have to fend off claims that at the end of the day she blinked in the compromise coming together.
But when it came to the budget year that just ended June 30, Hassan gets to say "I told you so."
We speak of the news that the state budget surplus for the previous year was $73.2 million or $25 million more than what Republican budget writers had thought it was going to be when they last opined on the topic in June.
After the budget veto, Senate and House Republican leaders claimed Hassan made the move because she had botched the previous spending year and was in danger of finishing that cycle in deficit.
This came after the Hassan administration acknowledged that there was a late Medicaid expense that was going to cost state books nearly $40 million than first thought.
Hassan told NH1 News at the time that despite skepticism her agency heads were going to for the most part meet their targets for returning unspent or lapse money to the treasury.
Now count on Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, and others to emphasize some of this black ink was built not by prudent management but by not spending money they should have such as the $20 million left in a Department of Health and Human Services account meant to go for programs serving the developmentally disabled.
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The governor and legislative leaders have a decision to make.
Do they decide for relatively cheap money to make the essence of a state lawsuit go away or stand firm in part so not to send the signal that it’s okay to go to court against New Hampshire to try and get what you want?
The topic is the education funding lawsuit and case in point with $25 million more in likely surplus do you devote 60 percent of it [-] about $15 million - to give school districts what they would otherwise be entitled to over the next two years.
Dover started the suit over a cap on increases in state grants that has been in place for roughly four years. The $15 million would not resolve "lost" money by these districts that didn’t get the full benefit of increases in school enrollments under the education aid formula.
Hassan said lawmakers should consider using some of the surplus for the purpose but made no commitment.
For lawmakers advocating for these school districts, that’s a start.
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Quote of the Week:
"To see the look on his face, hey we got you a bed. That’s like a unicorn in the state of New Hampshire, I’ll tell you that.’’ [-] Former drug addict Corey Currivan telling a Catholic Medical Center roundtable what he sees as the biggest problem in dealing with the heroin epidemic - not enough treatment.
2. Lowering Business Taxes Isn't the Answer
Lower taxes aren't what we need, this is
Some insights on what NH can do attract more businesses
by Jayme Simoes, nhbr.com, October 2, 2015
So, we got a tax cut. Thanks. And, they said it was to help keep young people in New Hampshire.
But, in the real world, a business tax cut does little to address the issues that our New Hampshire economy faces. We have witnessed economic growth cool recently, as a wave of consolidation has seen large New Hampshire banks, utilities and corporations be bought out by national organizations.
The transfer of jobs out of state has often followed this. It certainly speaks to New Hampshire being part of a larger regional economy – and with our small population, and peripheral location, it is a trend that is hard to reverse with tax cuts.
And all this comes with a loss of young people from New Hampshire: Call it a youth drain.
With fewer management jobs, especially in rural areas, many New Hampshire youth are drawn out of state to the more diverse economies in places such as Boston. And while there have been several effective efforts to stem this exodus, the issue is hard to change.
As one business owner, let me offer some insight on what we can do to attract more businesses to locate and stay in New Hampshire, and address our loss of talented youth.
Invest in education. Good universities attract good companies. You see that in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Mass. But you also see it in the Upper Valley and Seacoast.
Investing in education is an economic investment, because new companies are often tied to where their founder got a degree, and to a future workforce of talented people.
We have to invest in K-12 education too. From community technical education, to STEM, to the arts, helping kids get a solid public education is just good economic policy. No excuses – they are tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. And good schools are a big deal for both young families and businesses.
Stabilize health care costs: More than taxes, this is the cost that most employers’ fear – and until recently it kept going up and up. Costs have stabilized under the ACA, and competition has increased, but it is crucial to keep that trend going, and help provide good health care for our workforce. A healthy workforce is a productive workforce.
The workforce needs affordable housing. Costly housing does not help incubate businesses.
Invest in transportation infrastructure. This is a New England economy yet we still have a New Hampshire-focused infrastructure. Young people, tech businesses, and pretty much anybody wants access to Boston. We need light rail, otherwise we are cutting ourselves off from the regional hub and losing an advantage of proximity.
This is special state, and people who come here tend to like it and think about living here. For that reason, we need to invest in our special places, preserve out history and invest in smart planning. Places like Portsmouth offer a sense of place and history, and we need that across the state. We need to conserve our environment, with access to the wilderness for every one from hunters to hikers. And, we need to maintain clean water, clean air and healthy habitats.
Tourism is economic development. Bringing quality guests to our state gets many to think about living and doing business here. Sending the right message about New Hampshire is the same as marketing the state as a place to live and work. This one pays immediate dividends, too.
Listen to business leaders and young people. They are very clear about what they want and need: good schools, safe cities, public transportation, a clean environment. At the end of the day, it is not about what we can afford, but what happens if we don’t do the right thing for our economy.
3. Stop with the Straddling
THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
by Peter Egelston, nh.nextgenclimate.org, September 22, 2015
Aside from our mutual appreciation for good beer, Kelley Ayotte and I have something else in common: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in New Hampshire appeals to both of us.
RGGI appeals to Senator Ayotte because it is a market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in nine northeastern states, and because RGGI was approved and established in New Hampshire by a bi-partisan state legislature. I like RGGI for those same reasons, and also because the program offers incentives to encourage businesses like mine to opt for conservation and cutting-edge energy efficient technologies when making plans for expansion or new construction. These incentives help make those choices economically viable in the short term, so all of us can benefit in the long term.
Having just returned from meeting with several US Senators and their staffs in support of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, I want to reflect on my recent Washington, D.C. visit. I met with Senator (Jeanne) Shaheen and several of her colleagues on the Senate Climate Change Task Force. One senator said in the introductions that we were at the “scene of the crime” — that is, we were sitting in the hearing room in which the senate majority will likely vote to reject the Clean Power Plan before the end of the year.
In my remarks to the senators I explained I support the Clean Power Plan for reasons that are admittedly based on small business self-interest. First, the agricultural products we use at Smuttynose are very susceptible to climate change impacts in terms of price and availability. Second, the electric infrastructure — the “grid” upon which we depend — is exposed to more frequent storms. Each major weather incident that disrupts the power coming into our building has a costly impact on our bottom line. Third, the Clean Power Plan provides a degree of certainty for the next 20 years — critical for businesses looking at continuity.
One of the questions Senator Ayotte has about the Clean Power Plan is whether New Hampshire, because we have been participating in RGGI, benefits from the EPA rule; the answer is a definitive yes. It is a “yes” from the NH Department of Environmental Services, and a “yes” from small businesses and economists. The bottom line: we’ve paid our dues and now we can benefit.
Kelley Ayotte and I have the same position on RGGI, but presently we don’t have the same perspective on the EPA Clean Power Plan. I support it, while Senator Ayotte remains undecided. And that’s where politics become frustrating. Smuttynose, like many other small businesses, has a “green team” of employees ready to tackle energy challenges. We are beginning to discuss how to prosper in spite of shifting weather patterns and uncertain energy costs. But despite good examples of towns and businesses taking up the mantle of sustainability, strong federal policy on carbon pollution is necessary. Polls show a consistent level of approval in New Hampshire for reducing carbon pollution from upwind power plants. Yet Senator Ayotte still feels she needs to remain neutral on the Clean Power Plan. This is a good time for her to climb down off the fence and take a leadership position on this important issue.
Peter Egelston is President of Smuttynose Brewing Company.
AND NATIONALLY
4. Economic Voodoo Priests
Voodoo Never Dies
by Paul Krugman, nytimes.com, October 2, 2015
So Donald Trump has unveiled his tax plan. It would, it turns out, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
This is in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
For what it’s worth, it looks as if Trump’s plan would make an even bigger hole in the budget than Jeb’s. Jeb justifies his plan by claiming that it would double America’s rate of growth; The Donald, ahem, trumps this by claiming that he would triple the rate of growth. But really, why sweat the details? It’s all voodoo. The interesting question is why every Republican candidate feels compelled to go down this path.
You might think that there was a defensible economic case for the obsession with cutting taxes on the rich. That is, you might think that if you’d spent the past 20 years in a cave (or a conservative think tank). Otherwise, you’d be aware that tax-cut enthusiasts have a remarkable track record: They’ve been wrong about everything, year after year.
Some readers may remember the forecasts of economic doom back in 1993, when Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate. What happened instead was a sustained boom, surpassing the Reagan years by every measure.
Undaunted, the same people predicted great things as a result of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. What happened instead was a sluggish recovery followed by a catastrophic economic crash.
Most recently, the usual suspects once again predicted doom in 2013, when taxes on the 1 percent rose sharply due to the expiration of some of the Bush tax cuts and new taxes that help pay for health reform. What happened instead was job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s.
Then there’s the recent state-level evidence. Kansas slashed taxes, in what its right-wing governor described as a “real live experiment” in economic policy; the state’s growth has lagged ever since. California moved in the opposite direction, raising taxes; it has recently led the nation in job growth.
True, you can find self-proclaimed economic experts claiming to find overall evidence that low tax rates spur economic growth, but such experts invariably turn out to be on the payroll of right-wing pressure groups (and have an interesting habit of getting their numbers wrong). Independent studies of the correlation between tax rates and economic growth, for example by the Congressional Research Service, consistently find no relationship at all. There is no serious economic case for the tax-cut obsession.
Still, tax cuts are politically popular, right? Actually, no, at least when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans believe that upper-income individuals pay too much in taxes, while 61 percent believe that they pay too little. Even among self-identified Republicans, those who say that the rich should pay more outnumber those who say they should pay less by two to one.
So every Republican who would be president is committed to a policy that is both demonstrably bad economics and deeply unpopular. What’s going on?
Well, consider the trajectory of Marco Rubio, who may at this point be the most likely Republican nominee. Last year he supported a tax-cut plan devised by Senator Mike Lee that purported to be aimed at the poor and the middle class. In reality, its benefits were strongly tilted toward high incomes — but it still drew harsh criticism from the right for giving too much to ordinary families while not cutting taxes on top incomes enough.
So Mr. Rubio came back with a plan that eliminated taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inherited wealth, providing a huge windfall to the very wealthy. And suddenly he was gaining a lot of buzz among Republican donors. The new plan would add trillions to the deficit, which conservatives claim to care about, but never mind.
In other words, it’s straightforward and quite stark: Republicans support big tax cuts for the wealthy because that’s what wealthy donors want. No doubt most of those donors have managed to convince themselves that what’s good for them is good for America. But at root it’s about rich people supporting politicians who will make them richer. Everything else is just rationalization.
Of course, once the Republicans settle on a nominee, an army of hired guns will be mobilized to obscure this stark truth. We’ll see claims that it’s really a middle-class tax cut, that it will too do great things for economic growth, and look over there — emails! And given the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism, this campaign of obfuscation may work.
But never forget that what it’s really about is top-down class warfare. That may sound simplistic, but it’s the way the world works.
5. Mandatory Voting?
http://www.newsweek.com/should-voting-be-compulsory-376905
Should Voting Be Compulsory?
by William A. Galston and E.J. Dionne Jr., newsweek.com, September 27, 2015
When we receive a summons for jury duty, we are required to present ourselves at the court. Should we treat showing up at the polls in elections the same way?
Although the idea seems vaguely un-American, it is neither unusual, nor undemocratic, nor unconstitutional. And it would ease the intense partisan polarization that weakens both our capacity for self-government and public trust in our governing institutions.
It is easy to dismiss this idea as rooted in a form of coercion that is incompatible with our individualistic and often libertarian political culture. But consider Australia, whose political culture may be as similar to that of the United States as the culture of any other democracy in the world.
The Australian Solution
Alarmed by a decline in voter turnout to less than 60 percent in the early 1920s, Australia adopted a law in 1924 requiring all citizens to present themselves at the polling place on Election Day. (This is often referred to as mandatory voting, although Australian voters are not required to cast marked ballots.)
Enforcing the law were small fines (roughly the same as for routine traffic tickets), which increased with repeated acts of nonparticipation. The law established permissible reasons for not voting, such as illness and foreign travel, and procedures allowing citizens facing fines for not voting to defend themselves in court.
It also required citizens to register to vote (much as the United States has draft registration) and the Australian authorities have created systems to make registration easy.
The results were remarkable. In the 1925 election, the first held under the new law, turnout soared to 91 percent. In the 27 elections since World War II, turnout in Australia has averaged 95 percent.
It is hard to doubt that there is a causal connection between the law and the large change in Australians’ voting behavior. And there is additional evidence from the Netherlands, which operated under similar legislation from 1946 to 1967. During that time, turnout averaged 95 percent. After the Netherlands repealed this law, turnout has fallen to an average of 80 percent.
The impact of such laws can extend well beyond the act of voting. In Australia, citizens are more likely than they were before the law was passed to view voting as a civic obligation. This norm helps explain why the negative side effects that many feared did not materialize.
For example, the percentage of ballots intentionally spoiled, left blank, or randomly completed as acts of resistance has remained quite low. The Australian experience suggests that when citizens know that they are required to vote, they take this obligation seriously. Their sense of civic duty makes them reluctant to cast uninformed ballots and inclines them to learn at least the basics about issues, parties and candidates.
Why the Australian Model Makes Sense for Democracies—Including Ours
The most straightforward argument for near-universal voting is democratic. Ideally, a democracy will take into account the interests and views of all citizens so that its decisions represent the will of the entire people. If some regularly vote while others do not, elected officials are likely to give less weight to the interests and views of non-participants.
In practice, this might not matter much if non-voters were evenly distributed through the population, so that voters were a microcosm of the people. But that is not the case: In the United States, citizens with lower levels of income and education are less likely to vote, as are young adults and recent immigrants.
Changes in our political system have magnified these disparities. The decline of formal political organizations, including political machines, has reduced mobilizing efforts that were often year-round propositions and frequently gave life to political clubs that served as centers of sociability as well as electoral action.
The sharp drop in union membership since the 1950s has further eroded connections between citizens of modest means and lower levels of formal education to electoral politics. In their heyday, national civic institutions organized along federal lines performed these functions as well, but they too have undergone a relentless decline.
These factors were partly offset by a democratization of the electorate through the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that empowered African Americans, particularly in the South, and by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution that lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the country in 1971.
But with the exception of a few states that provided for registration on Election Day itself, the inclusion of younger voters into the electorate was not matched by changes in voter registration laws to make it easier for younger Americans, who tend to change residencies more frequently than their elders, to be included on the voter rolls.
As it is, registration rules are biased in favor of those with relatively stable residential patterns. The combination of the decline in political mobilization and the rise of a younger electorate mean that turnout in presidential elections has fallen off since the 1950s.
As measured against the voting age population, turnout in 1952 hit 63.3 percent, fell slightly to 60.6 percent in 1956 and rebounded to 62.77 percent in the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960. The last time turnout topped 60 percent was 1968.
The drop between 1968 and 1972, after the enfranchisement of all 18 year olds, was especially sharp—from 60.84 percent to 55.21 percent. The highest turnout since then (58.23 percent) came with the Obama mobilization efforts in 2008, but even this number was lower than the turnout figures between 1952 and 1964. And turnout fell off again in 2012, to 54.87 percent.
Universal voting would help fill the vacuum in participation by evening out disparities stemming from income, education and age. It would enhance our system’s ability to represent all our citizens and give states and localities incentives to lower, not raise, procedural barriers to the full and equal participation of each citizen in the electoral process.
If citizens had a legal obligation to vote, managers of our electoral process would in turn have an obligation to make it as simple as possible for voters to discharge this duty.
The weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court has allowed many states to impose new requirements on voters and to cut back on early and Sunday voting. Universal voting would change the presumptions in favor of broad democratic participation and put states on the side of promoting that goal.
It would also improve electoral competition. Campaigns could devote far less money to costly, labor-intensive get-out-the-vote efforts. Media consultants would not have an incentive to drive down turnout with negative advertising (even though such advertising would no doubt remain part of their repertoire). Candidates would know that they had to do more than appeal to their respective bases with harshly divisive rhetoric and an emphasis on hot-button issues.
This brings us to a benefit of universal voting that goes to the heart of our current ills. Along with many other factors, our low turnout rate pushes American politics toward hyper-polarization. Intense partisans are more likely to participate in lower-turnout elections while those who are less ideologically committed and less fervent about specific issues are more likely to stay home.
Although responding to strong sentiments is an important feature of sustainable democratic institutions, our elections tilt much too far in that direction.
A structural feature of our system—elections that are quadrennial for president but biennial for the House of Representatives—magnifies these ills. It is bad enough less than three-fifths of the electorate turns out to determine the next president, much worse that roughly two-fifths participate in midterm elections two years later.
As Republicans found in 2006 and Democrats in 2010 and 2014, when intervening events energize one part of the political spectrum while disheartening the other, a relatively small portion of the electorate can shift the balance of power out of proportion to its numbers. And with the rise of the Obama Coalition, the midterm electorate is decidedly older and less diverse than the electorate in presidential years.
The vast difference between these two electorates has enshrined new forms of conflict in an already polarized political system. Bringing less partisan voters into the electorate would reduce this instability, and it would offer parties and candidates new challenges and opportunities.
The balance of electoral activities would shift from the mobilization of highly committed voters toward the persuasion of the less committed. Candidates unwilling or unable to engage in persuasion would be more likely to lose. If political rhetoric cooled a bit, the intensity of polarization would diminish, improving the prospects for post-election compromise.
Rather than focusing on symbolic gestures whose principal purpose is to agitate partisans, Congress might have much stronger incentives to take on serious issues and solve problems. To pick up a term of the moment, universal voting might combat the “Trumpification” of politics.
The electorate that turns out is not representative of the country as a whole. After the election of 2014, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) re-interviewed 1,339 respondents who had been contacted in a pre-election survey.
The post-election poll found that Hispanic voters comprised 8 percent of midterm voters but 22 percent of non-voters. Millennials, those of ages 18-to-34, made up 17 percent of voters—and 47 percent of non-voters. Those earning less than $30,000 a year accounted for 26 percent of voters and 44 percent of non-voters.
And the underrepresentation of middle-of-the-road voters was brought home by both the PRRI survey and a Pew Research Center study of the 2012 electorate. In the PRRI study, independents accounted for 33 percent of voters but 42 percent of non-voters. Moderates accounted for 31 percent of voters but 38 percent of non-voters.
Based on the turnout model of the 2012 Pew pre-election study, independents made up 27 percent of likely voters but 44 percent of non-voters; moderates accounted for 34 percent of likely voters but 38 percent of non-voters.
A republic governed under a Constitution that begins with the words “We the people” should want an electorate as broadly representative of the people as possible.
There is a final reason for the country to embrace universal voting, and it may be the most compelling: Democracy cannot be strong if citizenship is weak. And right now, citizenship in America is radically unbalanced: It is strong on rights but weak on responsibilities.
With the abolition of the universal draft, citizens are asked to pay their taxes and obey the law—and show up for jury duty when summoned. That’s about it.
Making voting universal would begin to right the balance. And it would send an important message: We all have the duty to help shape the country that has given us so much.
William F. Buckley Jr., who can fairly be thought of as the founder of contemporary American conservatism, wrote a book in 1990 called Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country. Gratitude is personal, but as Buckley made clear, it is also civic, and it is a disposition that transcends ideology.
Participation in self-rule is an expression of gratitude for the freedom we have to govern ourselves.
[For an expanded version of this report, including footnotes and further exploration of the issue, click on the following link:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/09/21-universal-voting-galstone-dionne/universal_voting.pdf ]
6. Who Are the Crazy Ones?
A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths
by Nicholas Kristof, nytimes. October 3, 2015
We’ve mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief. It’s time for a new approach to gun violence.
We’re angry, but we also need to be smart. And frankly, liberal efforts, such as the assault weapons ban, were poorly designed and saved few lives, while brazen talk about banning guns just sparked a backlash that empowered the National Rifle Association.
What we need is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model we use to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from swimming pools to cigarettes. We’re not going to eliminate guns in America, so we need to figure out how to coexist with them.
First, we need to comprehend the scale of the problem: It’s not just occasional mass shootings like the one at an Oregon college on Thursday, but a continuous deluge of gun deaths, an average of 92 every day in America. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.
When I reported a similar figure in the past, gun lobbyists insisted that it couldn’t possibly be true. But the numbers are unarguable: fewer than 1.4 million war deaths since 1775, more than half in the Civil War, versus about 1.45 million gun deaths since 1970 (including suicides, murders and accidents).
If that doesn’t make you flinch, consider this: In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.
More than 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, and most of the rest are homicides. Gun enthusiasts scoff at including suicides, saying that without guns people would kill themselves by other means. In many cases, though, that’s not true.
In Great Britain, people used to kill themselves by putting their heads in the oven and asphyxiating themselves with coal gas. This accounted for almost half of British suicides in the late 1950s, but Britain then began switching from coal gas to natural gas, which is much less lethal. Sticking one’s head in the oven was no longer a reliable way to kill oneself — and there was surprisingly little substitution of other methods. Suicide rates dropped, and they stayed at a lower level.
The British didn’t ban ovens, but they made them safer. We need to do the same with guns.
When I tweeted about the need to address gun violence after college shooting in the Roseburg, Ore., a man named Bob pushed back. “Check out car accident deaths,” he tweeted sarcastically. “Guess we should ban cars.”
Actually, cars exemplify the public health approach we need to apply to guns. We don’t ban cars, but we do require driver’s licenses, seatbelts, airbags, padded dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. And we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate by 95 percent.
One problem is that the gun lobby has largely blocked research on making guns safer. Between 1973 and 2012, the National Institutes of Health awarded 89 grants for the study of rabies and 212 for cholera — and only three for firearms injuries.
Daniel Webster, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, notes that in 1999, the government listed the gun stores that had sold the most weapons later linked to crimes. The gun store at the top of the list was so embarrassed that it voluntarily took measures to reduce its use by criminals — and the rate at which new guns from the store were diverted to crime dropped 77 percent.
But in 2003, Congress barred the government from publishing such information.
Why is Congress enabling pipelines of guns to criminals?
Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.
A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.
We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.
It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.
The gun lobby argues that the problem isn’t firearms; it’s crazy people. Yes, America’s mental health system is a disgrace. But to me, it seems that we’re all crazy if we as a country can’t take modest steps to reduce the carnage that leaves America resembling a battlefield.
7. Behind the Trump Base
ained_in_five_simple_steps/
Donald Trump’s Appeal Explained in 5 Simple Steps
Donald Trump didn't come from nowhere. These passions drive his base, and will still exist even if Trump implodes.
by Paul Rosenberg, slate.com, September 29, 2015
The longer Donald Trump has continued to lead the GOP field, the more explanations have been proposed to explain — or explain away — his support. The vast majority have been about as credible or well thought-out as something Trump himself might say. But the day after the second GOP debate, political scientist Richard M. Skinner put everyone else to shame on the “What’s up with Trump?” beat, with a post at the Brookings Institute’s FixGov blog. He provided a concise account of five factors which combine to make Trump seem not just comprehensible, but almost inevitable—and help illuminate the broader political dynamics which his campaign vividly illustrates. These dynamics will not go away, even if Trump’s support has perhaps peaked.
“I am not one of those who are inclined to read profundities into the Trump phenomenon,” Skinner wrote, but as he told Salon, he was referring to trying to make sense of what supporters were telling pollsters. “If you don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, but you get a little bit of news, you watched TV news, you see stuff on Facebook, there’s one presidential candidate on the Republican side you’re going to hear about,” he observed. So a certain undetermined amount of Trump’s support is simply exposure to folks who don’t normally follow politics much.
But those people, and their disengagement from politics as party leaders and elites know it, are actually indicative of one of the five factors Skinner pointed to. The lack of ideological thinking among low-information, low-engagement voters has been known for at least 50 years, and was first cogently laid out by Philip E. Converse, a pioneer of public opinion research, in his 1964 article, “The nature of belief systems in mass publics.” (More on it below.) Skinner notes that ideological thinking appears to be more widespread than it once was, but there are still a preponderance of non-ideological voters out there. The other four factors, however, all seem to be growing in their impact.
Skinner first called attention to two factors—“authoritarianism” and “ethnocentrism”— that do introduce some degree of cross-issue consistency, though not the same sort of traditional ideological forms that political junkies are familiar with. These two factors are attitudinal constructs seen around the world that have been studied and dissected for at least 60 and 100 years respectively. Skinner also called attention to two less universal factors, which nonetheless have played a significant role in American politics in recent decades—declining political trust and growing negative partisanship—which most political commentary routinely ignores.
So Trump supporters, individually, may not be saying anything profound when express their support, but they reflect something profound that’s much larger than them. “One of the reasons I’m not inclined to get very profound about him [Trump] is because he’s more like the guy riding a wave, more than like the guy who creates it, more than the moon creating the tide,” Skinner said.
Authoritarianism
The first of the five factors Skinner cited was authoritarianism, “That was a big buzzword in social science back in the ’40s and ’50s,” he said. “People were still trying to explain fascism. More recently, as I mentioned, Mark Hetherington and John Weiler brought it back.” That’s a reference to their 2009 book,Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, which he cited in his discussion of authoritarianism. “It’s concerned with order, maintaining traditional hierarchy, a sort of suspicion of dissent,” he said, “and the interesting thing we’ve found over the past 20 years is that it is starting to play more and more of a role in American politics, that Republicans are starting to do better with people who have more of an authoritarian orientation.”
The use of physical punishment to discipline children is a fundamental indicator of authoritarian views and a chart from the book shows how significant a role it plays in influencing votes for president. In a discussion forum on their book, Hetherington and Weiler presented a similar chart for the 2008 election. “Of course, we don’t think that spanking kids causes people to vote Republican,” they wrote. “We do, however, show in the book that those who view the world in hierarchical terms, a worldview consistent with using physical means to discipline children, are now much more likely to vote Republican.”
This was the result of “a gradual evolution” of an authoritarian-based issue agenda over the last few decades, they wrote. “That evolution started with race and ‘law and order’ in the 1960s, continued with the emergence of feminism and differing approaches to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and hardened following the rise of gay rights, terrorism, and immigration as high-profile issues in the 1990s and 2000s.”
Hetherington backed up Skinner’s view of Trump as a creature of these larger forces. “This is best thought of as a process rather than a particular sort of event in time,” he told Salon. “You can see the appeal of Trump through a process of decisions that Republicans had made through decades. The signature issue for Trump, of course, is being really really conservative on immigration, the denigration of an out-group of people, Hispanics, in this case,” Hetherington said. “This actually fits a pattern of things, it’s just that the out-group has changed. If you go back to the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon in 1968, there was the denigration of African-Americans; then that became unfashionable, it morphed into welfare recipients, it had in the background the understanding that this was a racialized sort of thing.”
The timing of when different issues became part of this dynamic might be surprising—immigration, for example. “If you look at the image a immigration chapter in our book, there was no divide between Republicans and Democrats in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Hetherington pointed out. “But when it was raised as an issue, the Republicans felt pretty natural going in the anti-immigrant direction, and it’s also important to realize that the Democrats felt pretty natural going in a pro-immigration direction. It’s not a one-sided process.” So, the specific timing was set by outside forces. But the positions the parties took was driven by a consistent internal logic.
“This is not something that happened out of the blue,” Hetherington summed up. “This is the result of a process of Republicans trying to compete for white Southern and white working-class voters who tend to be very conservative in their otherness issue domains, and so that’s what Trump is appealing to.” Then he went a step further. “It’s not even just his issue positions,” he said. “It’s also a style, his blustery, very simple word use—you wanna be winners, other people are losers—type of dichotomous worldview.” Trump is, after all, aperformer of politics.
“This is best thought of as a culmination,” Hetherington reiterated . Even though “Republicans are absolutely horrified about it,” given how crudely Trump makes his case, they can’t easily escape from his position, because, “It’s the culmination of a process as opposed to something that just parachuted in at this particular moment.”
This evolution does not stretch to include all issues across the ideological board, however. At one point, the book contains a table with two contrasting lists of “Authoritarian-Structured Values and Preferences” and “Traditional Political Values and Preferences.” The first contained items like “School boards should fire gay teachers,” “Should do more to restrict people coming into the country,” and “Discrimination against blacks is rare.” The second included “Businesses make too much profit,” and “Poor have become too dependent on gov’t assistance programs.” In four short years, from 2003 to 2007, partisan differences for the 14 items in the first category increased from 14.9% to 20.1%, an increase of 5.2%. At the same time, the partisan differences for the 14 items in the second category, although higher, actually decreased by 1.9%.
So this is the background Skinner was drawing on. “All authoritarian voters are not necessarily conservative voters,” he said. “With Trump, he displays a lot of the factors that we tied to authoritarianism, the emphasis on ‘I’m going to restore American greatness,’ the suspicion of minority groups, the emphasis on ‘I’m going to restore order,’ ‘I’m going to restore traditional hierarchy,’ particularly race and gender, you know there’s an awful lot of that,” Skinner said. “On the other hand, as I point out, if you look at Trump’s statements—I don’t know how much people pay attention to this—but I think on issues, he’s a pretty incoherent guy, ideologically. No one would look at the things that Trump has said and say , ‘Wow! This is mister conservative!’ You’d say this more like, this is a grab bag, you have ideas that are tied tied together, but more by authoritarianism than by traditional liberal/conservative ideologies.”
Ethnocentrism
The second factor Skinner focuses on—ethnocentrism—has been studied for more than a century. “Trump seems to consistently appeal to ethnocentrism—favoring one’s own racial or ethnic group above others,” Skinner wrote, citing as examples his stance on immigration, his willingness to use racially charged language, his tough talk on trade and “law and order,” using polarizing language reminiscent of Patrick Buchanan or George Wallace.
The term “ethnocentrism” was coined by sociologist William G. Sumner in his 1906 book, Folkways: A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals, where he introduced it as one of his “fundamental notions,” defining it as “the technical name for this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.” He added, “Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones.” The initial focus was on its social role—promoting social cohesion and stability, for example—but its relationship to individual (political) psychology became a concern in tandem with the interest in authoritarianism after World War II. Although distinct, the two concepts have repeatedly been found to correlate with each other.
A 2001 paper, “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” highlighted the role of ethnocentrism in influencing attitudes toward social spending. Comparing the US to Europe, the paper concluded, “the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.”
(Not surprisingly, a similar relationship was shown in state-level spending within the US.) However, more recent work has produced a more refined understanding of how ethnocentrism operates. The 2009 book, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion, by Donald Kinder and Cindy Cam, covered a broad range of subjects, including differences between black and white ethnocentrism. But on spending issues, the pattern was strikingly clear, as underscored in an article by Matt Yglesias: ethnocentric voters oppose spending on means-tested programs such as welfare and food stamps, which they (mistakenly) perceive as primarily benefiting minorities not like them [chart], while supporting spending on Social Security and Medicare, which are seen quite differently as benefiting a truly deserving white middle class [chart].
Skinner told Salon that ethnocentrism was “clearly at the heart of Trump’s appeal.” First off, “The only issue where he’s pretty consistent is immigration. It’s pretty clearly that what what draws a lot of his supporters, and once again it’s more than a coherent kind of ideological framework that probably drives his support.” But Skinner quickly added, “He’s quite adamant in his support of entitlements that tend to go more to older white people, but very mocking of those that go to other folks.”
This fits in with a broader international pattern, Skinner wrote, “European politics is now filled with extreme-right parties who back a welfare state—but only for our people,” and he expanded on the parallels in conversation. “Right-wing parties in Europe, like the national front in France, they’re obviously very anti-immigrant, they’re very racist, and they’re opposed to programs that might go to minorities, but they’re very loudly supportive of the welfare state, for the traditional groups in society,” Skinner said.“You get someone like Maureen le Pen in France, on a lot of the economic issues she’s almost to the left of the mainstream parties in France. She very pro-welfare state, she’s very protectionist. It’s more like, ‘People have all these things, and they’re being endangered by all these outsiders.’ So there’s little echo of that in Trump. I don’t think Trump is Le Pen, but that sort of connection among issues fits very nicely with ethnocentrism.”
Lack of Ideology
The third factor Skinner cited was lack of ideology. About it, he wrote:
Ideology has been described as the system that tells voters “what goes with what.” Opposing abortion goes with supporting lower taxes. Wanting stricter environmental regulation goes with backing universal health care. By that standard, Trump has been a remarkably non-ideological candidate. Outside of his pet issue of immigration, his views don’t fall into liberal or conservative camps. In that, he fits with the attitudes of the less-informed citizens who seem to be backing him.
As political scientist Hans Noel explained in the link above, “Remembering Converse,” focused on the 1964 paper, “Those with low political knowledge have little to organize their political views. They respond mostly to the ephemeral nature of the times. Then, as voters become more knowledgable, groups become very salient, to be replaced by ideological thinking among only the most informed.” In fact, Converse only found about 3% of the population to be true ideologues, those who actively relied on “a relatively abstract and far-reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick,” while another 12% were “near ideologues,” a less sophisticated sort “who mentioned such a dimension in a peripheral way but did not appear to place much evaluative dependence upon it.” As Skinner mentioned, these numbers have increased since then, but they’re still a minority of the population. In contrast, to the extent that Trump’s views do tend to have some coherence, it’s the coherence provided by authoritarianism and ethnocentricism, both of which are tied to group identities and group interests, rather than the more abstract level of ideology. So Converse provides an insight into how Trump combines appeals to different levels of sophistication. It’s just not the levels that the political class considers worthy of consideration.
Skinner described two channels that bind the conservative GOP establishment together, but which leave Trump’s base untouched. “A really well informed conservative Republican probably would both have abstract ideas like libertarianism, or free enterprise, or traditional values, or whatever, and would also have picked up the message from Republican elites that this is what a good conservative Republican thinks,” he said. “People who are less aware don’t think that way, and also don’t pick up those messages.” So it’s both a matter of how people think about the world, and who they pay attention to. As elites try to overcome this two-fold barrier, to tell Trump supporters that he’s not a true conservative worthy of their support, they risk running into the fourth factor that Skinner described: distrust.
Distrust
“There’s been a long-term trend with trust, where its a long way down from where it was 50 years ago,” Skinner said, “and in the last several years with a war and then the recession, we’ve seen an even deeper fall in trust, falling trust government, and it seems particularly strong among Republicans, normally people trust government less when the president is of the other party, but there’s sort of a multiplicative effect here.”
Ordinarily the GOP would use this distrust to attack Democrats as the party of big government, but Trump has effectively outflanked them. After all, the GOP establishment controls Congress; their fingerprints are everywhere. Trump’s supporters trust him for giving voice to mass distrust. If distrusted elites attack him, they only validate him further. In his Brookings post, Skinner wrote, “Donald Trump is a perfect candidate for distrustful times…. Trump’s staunch defense of middle-class entitlements, while opposing Obamacare (but not for ideological reasons), fits the attitudes of the distrustful. His rhetoric, with its constant baiting of other politicians (and groups in the electorate), and its dark view of the current state of American life, matches the attitudes of those with sour opinions of the political system.”
Hetherington has also studied the decline of public trust as well, even writing a book about it. “It’s not just Trump in this regards,” he said. “A new poll from CNN came out over the weekend and what it shows is that the top three candidates with about 55% of the vote, the only three candidates on top, have no government experience at all. It is not even mild form of distrust.” With outsider candidates like these in the race, it’s not only bad news for the establishment, but even for self-styled “outsider” politicians, as well.
“Just imagine where Cruz might be if we didn’t include Trump or Carson in the race. He probably has most outsider demonstrables of anyone in the race, shutting government down, and some of the things, and he’s not getting traction hardly at all,” Hetherington said. And it’s not just Cruz, he pointed out. For most of American history, governors have registered strong outsider appeal, combined with a record of experience—think Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. The same had been expected this time around, perhaps from Scott Walker, now gone from the race. “This hyper outside caucus is soaking up a lot of support from these people who are more experienced candidates,” he concluded.
Skinner specifically cited Heatherington in his post:
According to Why Trust Mattersby Marc Hetherington, distrustful voters are not ideologically conservative. They are quite willing to hold on to the government programs that benefit themselves. But they resist initiatives that might help others—hence, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”
But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. The subtitle of Hetherington’s book is “Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism,” and the publisher’s description explains:
As people lost faith in the federal government, the delivery system for most progressive policies, they supported progressive ideas much less….Specifically, Hetherington shows that, as political trust declined, so too did support for redistributive programs, such as welfare and food stamps, and race-targeted programs. While the presence of race in a policy area tends to make political trust important for whites, trust affects policy preferences in other, non-race-related policy areas as well. In the mid-1990s the public was easily swayed against comprehensive health care reform because those who felt they could afford coverage worried that a large new federal bureaucracy would make things worse for them.
In conversation, Hetherington added another explanatory wrinkle, when he mentioned “the sort of ‘submerged state’ that exists, that provides these enormous benefits for in-group members that are just accepted as given, not opposed as government programs at all; but it’s the programs that benefit out groups that are ‘government programs’, even though they make up a relatively small percentage of the budget.” In her 2011 book The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy,Suzanne Mettler shows that even receiving government subsidies and incentives tend not to think of them as government programs, but simply mistake them as just part of how things are—as if there were nothing political about them.
Negative Partisanship
“Negative partisanship” was the fifth and final factor Skinner highlighted. “People are more likely to have really really negative views of other parties that they once did,” he said. “There are all sorts of measurements of this. Of course the most fun one is the one so increasing percentage of folks people say they would be distressed if their child matter married a member of the other party.” It’s also reflected in the rise of straight-ticket voting, “because partisanship lines up a lot with a lot of divisions in society, that it than it once did,” he explained. “If you go back to 1960s 70s, being a Democrat or Republican had absolutely nothing to do with your views on abortion. If you look at issues like civil rights and Vietnam, they divided the parties internally more than from each other.” Politically, it was a very different world.
“Today, the issues all the fall on the same divide, you see major cultural divisions in society fall along the same divide, race, religion, and so on. And that seems to be accentuating the sense of the other party being not just being mistaken, but really just alien,” Skinner said. “And Trump plays into that, despite not being that much of a Republican, not that much of the conservative; but there’s nobody else who’s been more identified with that sense that Obama is an alien, he’s not American, he’s not a Christian, he’s all these things,” and so, by being the embodiment of negative partisanship toward Obama, Trump has staked a strong claim to the GOP base, “even if there’s not a whole lot of ideological substance to what he says.”
Birtherism was the key to Trump’s transformation from the apolitical celebrity he had been to the right-wing hero role that he’s playing today. But far from being some sort of freak anomaly, once again we see Trump’s actions are a snug fit within the broader patterns of American politics—in this case, the historical trend of increasing negative partisanship.“To some Republicans,” Skinner wrote, “if Donald Trump is saying bad things about That Kenyan in the White House, he can’t be all bad.”
Summing Up
If Trump were explicable in terms of just one or two of these five factors, it might well explain his rapid rise in the GOP primary, though probably not his staying power. The fact that so many different factors combine to explain the logic of his success strongly suggests that he represents a much greater challenge than the political press has been willing to recognize, even as he’s shown some signs of possibly faltering in the polls. The combination of factors not only may make it more difficult to dislodge him, it also underscores the broader presence of persistent deep barriers to what GOP elites want to do—barriers within the ranks of their supporters. Even negative partisanship, which helps them in one way, promoting brand loyalty, can prove deeply destructive when it comes to governing—as the now-departing Speaker John Boehner can heartily attest.
But it’s not just a challenge to the GOP, much less to other candidates Trump is running against. Even though these factors don’t line up along elite-defined ideological lines, and even cut against them in significant ways, they representmore of a challenge to liberals than to conservatives. Authoritarianism and ethnocentrism have long been recognized as illiberal forces, Herrington’s book on distrust stresses its corrosive impact on liberal activist government, and negative partisanship makes governing more difficult—a result that conservative Republicans increasingly regard as a feature, not a bug. Even Trump’s appeal to non-ideological voters tends to hurt liberals more than conservatives, because liberal politics generally involve more sophisticated arguments, and more sensitive balancing of competing rights and interests.
This is why Trump’s surprising strength in the GOP primary should not be seen as good for liberals or Democrats, however helpful it may seem in the short run: it simultaneously strengthens multiple ways of seeing the world that are deeply at odds with how liberals seek to solve problems, by building bridges of dialogue, shared interests, mutual respect, and, ultimately, trust. In the end, it’s no accident that liberals build bridges, and Trump’s campaign is all about building a wall.
FINALLY twosome
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