Government Executive - Authors - Molly Ball

Is Ben Carson the New Republican Frontrunner?

Molly Ball — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 10:16:37 -0500

MILWAUKEE—Ben Carson came out to address the media after Tuesday night’s debate, emerging in the spin room with his typical air of beatific nonchalance. He was immediately engulfed by dozens of microphones and cameras; a reporter for the Daily Mail began shouting questions about new factual discrepancies in his autobiography. “Did you attack your mother with a hammer, or did she attack you?” the reporter shouted. “Are you running away from this question?” Carson simply ignored him and kept walking.

Off to the side of the surging mass of media, Carson’s campaign manager, a heavyset career operative named Barry Bennett, was exuberant. Had Carson won the debate? “I only care about the bank account, and we did well with that,” he said. The former neurosurgeon’s campaign had already taken in $6 million since the beginning of the month, $1 million the day of the debate alone.

The media are starting to call Carson the new frontrunner. He had a one-point lead over Donald Trump in the latest national poll. The past week saw him pass his first major test with surprising deftness, making a plausible defense against accusations he stretched the truth in his bestselling memoir and turning the episode into a crowd-pleasing attack on the liberal media. (Politico ran a story claiming Carson “fabricated” a scholarship offer from West Point, but the memoir acknowledges that he didn’t apply to the school, and “scholarship” is the school’s common term for its tuition-free offers of admission.) Carson is less deft when it comes to policy, but policy is not at the core of his appeal—rather, it is his status as an inspirational figure.

In the debate, no other candidate attacked Carson, and Carson didn’t attack the other candidates. He parried a question about his past with a good line—“I have no problem with being vetted. What I do have a problem with is being lied about”—and segued to accusing Hillary Clinton of having lied about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi. He also flip-flopped on the minimum wage (he’s now against it) and floundered around on questions about foreign policy and banking.

Bennett said it didn’t matter. “He’s just so much more likable than all the other guys,” he told me. “That’s a big deal. No one’s going to vote for an abrasive asshole. People voted for Ronald Reagan because they liked him. Nobody voted for Barack Obama because of his tax plan.”

Carson’s climb into first place is the latest weird wrinkle in a surpassingly weird political year. He is beloved by social conservatives and home-schoolers who’ve long consumed his books, movie, and speeches, all of which revolve around his tale of coming up from inner-city poverty to world-beating medical success, and taking on President Obama from the standpoint of a health-care expert and African American man of faith. Like Obama, his near-messianic persona allows him to evade the usual standards applied to other politicians.

Oddly, Carson’s rise hasn’t inspired the sort of full-scale freakout that Trump has caused among the long-suffering GOP establishment. This might be because Carson seems to fit a more familiar, and perennial, type: the social-conservative challenger who gives the frontrunner a scare in Iowa but eventually fades. Or it could be because, after Trump, the establishment has hit freakout fatigue. Or maybe, as Bennett has it, Carson just seems so doggone nice.

That very quality—the calm, smiling, steady bearing—has enabled Carson to creep into first place without being perceived as a threat. And it could make him hard to dislodge. Despite questionable campaign spending, he has plenty of money. His nutty statements and snake-oil salesmanship don’t shake his followers’ faith, and the first round of questions about his trustworthiness only strengthened him in their eyes. They want to believe.

The other candidates appear to understand that attacking Carson could backfire on them. And if there’s anything Trump’s sustained success has shown, it’s that a lot of regular Republican voters don’t see any good options among the traditional, government-experienced candidates. Pundits are praising Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio for their clever debating skills; Jeb Bush’s agonizing clumsiness has turned his campaign into an angst-ridden saga. But it’s Ben Carson who is taking the lead, and unless something changes, he could be there for a while.

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The Candidate Who Wanted to Kill Federal Employee Unions Has Left the Presidential Race

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:38:39 -0400

Every failed presidential campaign is a how-the-mighty-have-fallen story: a politician once strong or deluded enough to think he could lead the nation, humbled by the reality of the electorate’s indifference.

But Scott Walker’s fall was especially precipitous. The Wisconsin governor’s campaign lasted just 70 days. He came in as the Iowa frontrunner and departed a few weeks later as an asterisk, with too little support even to be assigned a number in the last national poll.

How does that happen? How does a politician make such a strong impression out of the gate, then disenchant virtually every person who once told a pollster he should be the next president? Walker didn’t make one giant, disqualifying gaffe. Instead, he made a series of small mistakes—tactical, strategic, rhetorical, and ideological—that added up to an unavoidable conclusion: No matter what, he would not be the nominee.

Walker started out strong—perhaps too strong. Speaking to a conservative confab in Iowa back in January, his lively but common-sense appeal made a major impression among conservatives in the early-voting state, and he rocketed into first place in a field that was just starting to take shape. (Though there wasn’t much doubt that he was running, Walker, citing his gubernatorial duties, wouldn’t officially declare his campaign until July.)

On paper, he seemed like an ideal candidate: He’d won three tough elections in a state generally dominated by Democrats, including a recall in 2012. His battles with public-sector unions had impressed national conservatives like the Koch brothers. He was a conservative who’d governed while taking on the status quo—a potent mix for a party whose restive base was tired of compromising and losing. As he liked to say, there were other candidates who were fighters and other candidates who were winners—but only Scott Walker was both.

But Walker’s unexpected early success was whatever you call the opposite of a blessing in disguise—a curse in disguise, perhaps. It made him overconfident, removing the incentive to put his head down, study policy, and work for votes, while training a harsh spotlight on his every utterance. Those utterances frequently made audiences and the media do double takes, as when he refused to say whether he considered President Obama a Christian, or when he claimed to be ready to take on the Islamic State because he’d taken on the unions. As theWashington Examiner’s Byron York wrote on Monday: “There had always been talk that Walker, as a Midwestern governor, wasn't well versed, or even very versed at all, in foreign policy. That turned out to be true.”

As a strategic matter, Walker may have chosen the wrong lane, or segment of the electorate. Correctly sensing conservatives’ desire for anti-establishment candidates, he tacked hard to the right, renouncing his previously moderate positions on immigration and emphasizing his social conservatism. In his blue state, Walker was used to being the most conservative guy in the room. But on the national stage, in a party tilting ever rightward, there was always someone willing to go farther, and many conservatives suspected him of posturing. When Donald Trump’s candidacy began to take off, Walker’s support in Iowa quickly evaporated. In the words of the Republican consultant Liz Mair, who had worked for Walker’s Wisconsin campaigns but was fired from his presidential effort for a handful of impolitic tweets, Walker failed because he became “so invested in winning, no matter what it took, that he lost sight of his real identity as a political leader.”

The practical effect of Walker’s hubris was a campaign that spent too much money too fast, on the assumption that its early flood of support would continue unabated. When the wheels began to come off and donors got skittish, there were too many mouths to feed. The super PAC supporting Walker was still flush with cash—two weeks ago, it reserved $7 million worth of television airtime in Iowa—but the actual campaign was broke. “People don’t stop running for president because they run out of ideas or run out of desire to keep giving speeches,” Terry Sullivan, campaign manager for Marco Rubio, said on Monday. “They stop because they run out of money.”

Last week’s Republican debate was the final straw. Walker had played it safe in the first debate last month, trying to seem serious and above the fray, only to find that he’d come across as boring and irrelevant. In the second, he vowed to strike a newly aggressive pose. He jumped in at the top with what was supposed to be a cutting insult of Trump: “We don’t need an apprentice in the White House,” he said. “We have one right now.” The line came across as corny, canned, and inaccurate: The whole point of The Apprentice, Trump's entrepreneurship-based reality show, was that Trump was not the apprentice but the master, with the contestants vying to be his apprentice. In any case, Walker didn’t manage to assert himself much for the rest of the debate, and was widely judged to be one of the night’s big losers.

Walker returns home badly damaged by his ill-starred foray onto the national stage. In Wisconsin, he’d built a fearsome reputation as a pol who couldn’t be toppled. He was known for his relentless discipline and ability to outsmart and outlast his rivals. But as a national candidate, he took stands that contrasted sharply with the rhetoric he’d used to get elected; he insulted his former colleagues in the Wisconsin legislature; and he seemed incapable of staying on message, especially on the immigration issue. Wisconsin’s once-dominant chief executive looks decidedly fallible, and even his allies doubt that he will run for a third term in 2018.

In his speech quitting the race on Monday, Walker depicted the Republican primary as a collective-action problem, with the sheer number of candidates preventing the electorate from coalescing around a responsible (read: non-Trump) choice. He urged other candidates to follow his lead and remove themselves from contention. But Walker, who is just 47, may have another strategic consideration in mind: safeguarding what’s left of his dignity with an eye to the future. Ever an astute political strategist, Walker has been here before. In 2005, he briefly entered the race for the 2006 gubernatorial nomination, only to drop out a few months later when it became apparent he couldn’t win. The move preserved his political reputation for 2010, when he ran and won. As Walker was dropping out on Monday, an operative in Milwaukee suggested a similar turn of events. “Past is prologue with Mr. Walker,” the operative texted. “National stage hasn’t seen the last of him.”

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Meet the New Hillary

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 12:14:52 -0400

MILWAUKEE—I am here to see the New Hillary.

Hillary Clinton, the once-inevitable Democratic nominee, has lately hit some snags. She is plummeting in the polls; her campaign lacks direction. So Hillary—I’m going to call her Hillary, like it says on her signs—would like to start over. She’s rolling out a new persona: spontaneous, funny, relatable, personable. A regular person, just like the good people of Milwaukee, who have come to see her on a drizzly September weekday.

Here we are at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Home of the Panthers. Home of lots of regular people—Hillary likes to call them Everyday Americans. (Oh God, that sounds weird, doesn’t it? Someone told The New York Times it sounded like “Everyday low prices,” at Walmart. Hillary is so sorry. Hillary will stop saying that.)

Hillary is also sorry about the whole email thing, which has been frightening and confusing, hasn’t it? Hillary has now—after months of explaining it away, shrugging it off, and expressing regret—apologized for the email thing, so that everyone can move on. But we regular people, we don’t really care about the email thing, right? We are noble, practical folks, with more important things to worry about, am I right?

“I’m very worried by these scandals, like the emails,” says Katherine Kober, a 36-year-old with short blond hair and a 1-year-old son strapped to her chest in a baby carrier. “That hurts her credibility, you know? I think she should have explained herself earlier. I worry that it’s a pride thing—I think her Achilles heel could be her pride.”

We are waiting in a big room above the student union for Hillary to arrive. The event—a Women for Hillary Grassroots Organizing Meeting—was originally going to take place out in the plaza, but it looked like it might rain, so everyone has been redirected inside. The line to get through the metal detectors snakes up two flights of stairs. Outside, some protesters who didn’t get the memo are still shuffling around the empty quad—a cluster of religious kids with bloody-fetus-part placards, a College Republican handing out sneaky little flyers to attendees “welcoming” her to campus. The flyers say: “As first lady, she was a monumental figure on advancing nationalized healthcare (pioneered by that wonderful Empire known as the Soviet Union).” Ha-ha!

No one seems to agree on how Hillary is doing right now. Is everything actually fine? Is the current drama just a passing blip? Or is this one of those moments when everything teeters on the edge—when a political campaign that seemed like a sure thing begins to collapse under its own weight? Loyal Democrats, across the country, aren’t worried necessarily, but they are starting to wonder how worried they should be. (“It is an arranged marriage,” one prominent Washington Democrat who is starting to worry told me. “Her support is broad, but not deep.”) Some of them are calling on Vice President Joe Biden to run—good old Uncle Joe! In fact, one of Hillary’s big donors met with him just the other day. But come on, how does everyone think this thing is going to end? Does anyone really think Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee?

“I like her better than a lot of other candidates—besides Bernie,” Jessica Differt, a crimson-haired 19-year-old student, tells me. “She’s definitely my number two if Bernie doesn’t win.” Differt, an aspiring comedian, is not too fazed by the emails—“I send stupid stuff all day, every day,” she says—but she feels like Hillary is too close to the big banks. Still, she would definitely take Hillary over any of the Republicans.

“Hillary is like a cool aunt, you know?” Differt says. “Like, you don’t want to tell her you’re pregnant, but you would tell her your boyfriend troubles. She’s nice, but she’s not my mom, you know?”

The room is filling up with people. There’s a student in a Trump hat—MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN—which turns out not to be totally ironic: He’s a physics major who identifies as a “conservative-leaning independent” but is sincerely interested in what Hillary has to say. The mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett, a tall, white-haired 61-year-old, is mingling in the crowd, oozing confidence. “There are seasons in a campaign,” he tells me, philosophically. “In the long run, I don’t think [the emails are] going to hurt her. It’s been a distraction, but she’ll get beyond it.”

While we are still waiting for Hillary to arrive—the crowd, standing, crammed behind metal barricades, the mute, expectant stage topped by a wood lectern, “Shake It Off” playing over the speakers—the backdrop suddenly comes crashing down. A support on the right side gives way and pulls the black curtain with it, plummeting onto the stage and taking down the Wisconsin and American flags. People laugh and raise their phones to take pictures.

Within an hour, America Rising, one of several PACs dedicated to destroying Hillary, has posted the 12-second video of the curtain crash on YouTube, titled “The Clinton Campaign Is Literally Collapsing.” A few days later, it has been viewed more than 100,000 times. That’s how badly people want to see Hillary fail. At the moment, she is giving them plenty to work with.

* * *

Hillary is here at last. She strides confidently onto the stage and hugs Martha Love, the Democratic National Committee member who gave the last of several introductions. Hillary is a fingertips hugger, not a full-body hugger: polite, careful, affectionate without being forward. “Wow,” she says into the microphone, “I am thrilled to be here!”

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Can Joe Biden Be an Alternative to Hillary Clinton?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 09:53:07 -0400

“I think panic is the operative mode for the Democratic Party,” David Axelrod, who has been on the receiving end of panic mode many times over the years, told me this week. I had asked Obama’s political guru how bad the current panic was for Hillary Clinton—bad enough for the party to seek an alternative? Bad enough, perhaps, to create an opening for Joe Biden?

Axelrod didn’t think so. “I think it’s indisputable she’s had a rocky few months,” he said. “But if you look at her support among Democrats, and the resources she brings, she’s still very strong—I think she’s going to be the nominee.”

Not everyone is so sure. Public opinion has turned starkly negative on Clinton in recent months, as she has struggled to put the scandal over her use of email as secretary of state to rest. In a poll released this week, the word most commonly summoned when people were asked about her was “liar.”

Clinton’s troubles have profoundly alarmed Democrats—and highlighted the party’s utter lack of backup plan. It is in this context that the boomlet for Biden, the 72-year-old vice president, has blossomed. That same recent poll found that, before even launching a campaign, he already has the support of 18 percent of Democratic primary voters, and would do better than Clinton against Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio in a general election.

Since the rumor that Biden was taking a close look at the race was planted earlier this month, speculation has swirled, some of it even holding that he was on the brink of announcing a candidacy. But several people close to the vice president told me he has not made a decision. When he told a conference call of Democratic National Committee members, on Wednesday, that he wasn’t sure he had the “emotional fuel” for a run, most Biden confidants believed he wasn’t spinning to buy time, but being honest about the calculation he’s weighing.

“I don’t think he’s made up his mind, and those who say he has probably don’t know what they’re talking about,” one longtime Biden friend told me. This person was skeptical that Biden would end up running, but pointed out that poll numbers and conventional wisdom had never been the lodestar for a brash political prodigy who defeated an incumbent senator at age 29: “He’s not afraid of being a long shot.”

Biden’s calculation is threefold: emotional, political, and logistical. Amid the continuing toll of his son Beau’s untimely death, hurling himself into a campaign promises more trouble and hurt. But saying “no” would entail its own grieving process, as the lifelong pol closed the door for good on his political career, without having achieved his life’s goal.

Most Democrats believe it would be logistically difficult to form an organization to compete with Clinton at this point; she has the backing of most of the party establishment and donors. “It's likely too late for a meaningful operation,” particularly in Iowa, one unaligned strategist told me. But Biden backers point to Barack Obama as precedent for passion and personality beating supposed inevitability; more than one told me of a flood of calls and emails from potential Biden backers, many of them nominally committed to Clinton.

“A lot of former staffers have held back, hoping this would happen,” Ronni Council, a Nevada Democratic operative who directed Biden’s campaign in the early-voting state in 2008, told me. (Biden, who dropped out after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, never made it to the Nevada contest, and Council went on to work for Clinton.) On the other hand, Bob Osterhaus, a former state representative in Anamosa, Iowa, who endorsed Obama in 2008 but has not committed to a candidate for 2016, told me he could not detect any buzz for Biden on the ground there.

But if what Democrats need is a backup plan for a possible Clinton collapse—someone to turn to if things get worse, not better, for the frontrunner’s joyless juggernaut—is Biden really the man for the job? The ideal Clinton alternative might be a fresh-faced liberal from outside the Beltway; Biden is an aging establishmentarian. Despite a buzzed-about recent meeting with liberal darling Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, Biden established a reputation during his decades in the Senate as a pragmatist, not a crusader. “His heart is very much in it,” another former Biden aide told me, “but the rest of it is very hard to figure out.”

Biden’s boosters point to the rise of Donald Trump on the Republican side as a sign Americans are currently looking for straight-shooting authenticity. “At a moment where, frankly, I don’t think this country can handle another eight years of bitter divisions, Joe Biden has the potential to be a unifying leader,” Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic operative who ran Obama’s 2012 campaign in the state, told me.

Schale was laid up with a broken leg a couple of weeks ago and emailing with a reporter for the New York Times. When the Times published his idle expression of enthusiasm for Biden, he found himself recruited to the Draft Biden super PAC, where he now holds the title of senior adviser. It’s a rather perfect distillation of the Biden boomlet, which has to a degree been spun out of thin air by bored reporters and underemployed Democratic operatives in the August dead zone of presidential politics.

Schale cited Biden’s personality, his work as vice president, and his blue-collar appeal as arguments for his candidacy. “I worry that, as much as the GOP is a clown car, they also are largely dictating the debate at this point,” he told me. “There’s just not a lot of interest in our side.” For Schale, a Biden candidiacy wasn’t some great calculation: “I just like the guy,” he said. “If he’s going to run, I want to be a part of it.” And if Biden runs, the rationale for his candidacy may be just that simple.

(Image via Jason and Bonnie Grower / Shutterstock.com)

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The End of the Obama Era

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:00:38 -0500

As you may have heard, 2014 was a good year for Republicans. They won a lot of elections! They won big elections and small elections, elections in red states and elections in blue states, elections everyone knew they would win and elections virtually no one expected them to win. They won the Senate, giving them a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in a decade. They netted 13 new seats in the House, giving them the largest House majority since FDR was president. Perhaps most crucially, Republicans now control 33 governorships and 68 of 98 statehouses, giving them the ability to implement their policy agenda across the country—something they still can't really do on the federal level, where President Obama remains a check on their influence.

On some level, this was expected to happen. It is normal, after all, for the president's party to lose ground in a midterm election, particularly in the sixth year of a two-term president's time in office, when the fickle American electorate tends to get particularly fed up with the chief executive whose leadership it has just ratified by reelecting him. (American voters: jerks, basically.) A year ago today, anyone who'd read the first chapter of the American Pundit's Manual could have told you, based on history, what result to expect.

But fortunately for those of us who didn't sleep through 2014, we know a lot of things today that we didn't know a year ago. And the midterm elections, while narrowly predictable, may have reshaped the political landscape in subtler and more interesting ways than a simple binary transfer of power from one party to another. In other words, what we witnessed in 2014 wasn't just a swing of the ol' pendulum; it was the end of the Obama era in American politics.

One major hallmark of the Obama era was the rise of the Tea Party, a far-right faction driven to conspiratorial derangement by literally anything Obama proposed. But in 2014, its power began to wane. In 2010 and 2012, it had hamstrung Republicans by toppling incumbents and establishment-backed candidates in primaries and by preventing the party from articulating a positive agenda beyond obstruction and Obama-bashing. In 2014, however, the GOP got its act together. No Senate incumbent lost a primary (though Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, was toppled in a stunning and unexpected upset), and virtually all the party's nominees were either handpicked by, or palatable to, the party establishment. Party operatives put their candidates through intensive trainings to prevent another gaffe-prone contender like Todd Akin from dominating the airwaves and making the whole party seem crazy; fresh faces likeJoni Ernst, in Iowa, and Cory Gardner, in Colorado, helped resuscitate the party's image in blue states—aided by unimpressive Democratic campaigns.

Democrats had proved extremely skilled in recent years at exploiting Republican divisions and tying GOP candidates to the worst tendencies of the party fringe. But these tactics ran aground when confronted with these upbeat, sanitized Republican opponents. In this way, 2014 may have marked the year when the Obama-campaign playbook—both in message and tactical terms—stopped working. Democratic campaigns banked on their ability to reshape the midterm electorate using the technological advances and mastery of data that Obama's team introduced to politics. But in too many cases, Democrats now acknowledge, their candidates failed to articulate a message that might have actually motivated their core voters. In addition, many formerly reliable Obama constituencies—like single women and Latinos—seemed to tire of the party's insistence that Republicans were out to get them, and either stayed home or crossed the aisle.

Most of all, of course, the midterms were a backlash against Obama's leadership and policies. Some of this was deserved—the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, for example, seemed to trigger an irrevocable loss of trust in the White House's competence. The fact that health-care reform went on to be implemented pretty smoothly after that did little to rescue the policy's, or the president's, reputation for effectiveness. Critics also argued that crises on the border and in the Middle East could be traced back to Obama's policies. Some of the president's political burden was more the function of horrendous timing, like the Ebola outbreak that flared in late summer and died down just after Election Day, or the good economic news that waited until right after the election to announce itself. And some was Republicans' fault, as their systematic obstruction first contributed to the president's reputation for not being able to get anything done—and then, when he began taking unilateral action to go around the reluctant Congress, helped paint him as a power-mad executive tyrant.

Put this all together, and you got a backlash against Obama that exceeded even Republicans' own expectations. The party's own strategists and pollsters did not foresee the scope of the victory that unfolded on November 4, including an unexpected Republican victory in the Maryland governor's race and a close call in the Virginia Senate race. Many Republican candidates had run relentlessly one-note campaigns tying their opponents to Obama and mining voters' dissatisfaction with Washington. But they correctly gauged voters' hunger for accountability—their desire to deliver a protest vote to a hapless and out-of-touch administration.

Obama now officially enters his lame-duck years, and much has been made of his rebound in the last month. Seemingly liberated by having nothing more to lose, he has struck an international climate deal, taken bold executive action on immigration, and unveiled a landmark shift in Cuba policy. The president also exerted some sway on the fiscal deal struck by the year-end Congress, convincing enough Democrats to vote for it to overcome liberal objections from Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. It's clearly too soon to pronounce the president irrelevant or his political reputation beyond rescue. But as the 2016 election gets under way, as it already has, American politics will increasingly be focused on the post-Obama world. As 2014 ends, so does the Obama era.

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A Republican Wave Sweeps the Midterm Elections

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 10:06:27 -0500

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Republicans took the Senate majority in a commanding sweep on Tuesday, winning nearly every contested race across the country, gaining governor's mansions and adding to their majority in the House of Representatives. For weeks, pundits had debated the semantics of what would constitute a "wave" election, but when it came, it was unmistakable.

Republicans unseated Democratic incumbents in Senate races in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Colorado, and were leading in Alaska early Wednesday. They easily held onto GOP-controlled seats in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. In New Hampshire, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen barely held on against Republican Scott Brown. In one of the night's biggest surprises, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who was thought to be safe, was up only half a point over his Republican challenger early Wednesday. The Louisiana election, in which Democrat Mary Landrieu finished slightly ahead of her Republican challenger, Bill Cassidy, was set to go to a December runoff, which Cassidy is favored to win.

Though Pennsylvania's abysmally unpopular Republican governor, Tom Corbett, was defeated, Republicans took over governor's mansions in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts, and were leading by a hair in Colorado. Controversial Republican incumbents Scott Walker (Wisconsin), Rick Snyder (Michigan), Sam Brownback (Kansas), Paul LePage (Maine), Nathan Deal (Georgia), and Rick Scott (Florida), all of whom had appeared vulnerable in pre-election polls, all held on to win reelection.

Ebullient Republicans, many of whom had run relentlessly one-note campaigns focused on the unpopular president, touted the results as a rejection of President Obama and Democratic policies. "This race wasn't about me or my opponent," Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator who easily won reelection and stands to become the new majority leader, told a ballroom full of supporters here. "It was about a government people no longer trust."

Much speculation now focuses on McConnell, who has been blamed for singlehandedly stopping most of the Obama agenda for the past five years. (Ironically, the conservatives who want the Obama agenda stopped give McConnell little credit for doing so.) But McConnell now faces a choice about whether continued obstruction will serve his party's interests. In his victory speech, he mentioned no specific policies but rather struck a conciliatory note.

"Some things don't change after tonight," he said. "I don't expect the president to wake up tomorrow and view the world any differently than he did when he woke up this morning, and he knows I won't either. But look, we do have an obligation to work together on issues where we can agree. Just because we have a two-party system doesn't mean we have to be in perpetual conflict."

The new Senate majority will mean the ascension of McConnell, a master politician who does not excel at the more public parts of the job—much like the outgoing majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. And it means the fall of Reid, who has led the majority since 2007, keeping a diverse caucus remarkably unified while changing the Senate rules and, Republicans complain, preventing most bills and amendments from being considered.

McConnell will now have his own fractious caucus to corral, starting with the junior senator in his own state, Rand Paul, who spoke from the same stage Tuesday night. Paul spoke of a sharply conservative agenda for the new Senate: tax cuts, balancing the budget, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, and "repealing every last vestige of Obamacare." McConnell will face pressure from conservatives like Paul and Ted Cruz of Texas to pursue a maximally confrontational approach—as Paul put it, sending Obama "bill after bill" and daring him to veto them all. On the other hand, Senate GOP pragmatists—likely including those just elected from blue states and those who face reelection in 2016—want the new majority to seek constructive compromise in order to prove to voters that Republicans can govern.

In an interview on Sunday, McConnell said his priorities would be "getting people back to work," principally by "pushing back against this overregulation," an allusion to the Environmental Protection Agency. But he also cited areas of potential agreement with Obama, beginning with comprehensive tax reform and free-trade agreements. On immigration, he said, "It's a possibility."

"I'm not opposed to doing business with the president," McConnell said. "He's going to be there two more years. If we can find ways to make some progress for the country, we ought to do it."

McConnell's counterpart in the House, Speaker John Boehner, also finds his hand strengthened by Tuesday's results, having added at least 10 seats to his Republican majority. Once beset by rumors he would retire or be dethroned, Boehner now faces no known challenger for the speaker's gavel. On the one hand, a larger majority will give Boehner more room to maneuver—he will be able to pass bills while losing more Republican votes. But on the other hand, many of his new members will be conservatives from deep-red districts, who may be disinclined to go along with any bipartisan compromises proffered by the Senate.

Why did Democrats lose? Exit polls pointed to an electorate that strongly resembled that of 2010, when the older, whiter electorate that favors Republicans turned out enthusiastically, while the young, non-white electorate that favors Democrats largely stayed home. The working-class vote—defined as voters making less than $50,000 per year, a crucial demographic for Democrats—was only 37 percent of the electorate, comparable to 2010, when it was 36 percent. Those voters favored Democrats by a 14-point margin; the party generally wins when the margin approaches 20 points. Look for many Democrats to argue that the party must put more emphasis going forward on a populist economic message.

Plenty of other factors conspired against Democrats. Obama's popularity has dropped steadily for the last year as he faces crisis after crisis—some impossible to anticipate and some of his own making, from the rollout of Healthcare.gov (though, liberals note, opposition to Obamacare was not a major theme of many Republican campaigns) to the Islamic State insurgency, the border crisis, and the Ebola epidemic. Democrats' expensive, much-touted effort to expand the midterm electorate through field organizing in targeted states proved unavailing—indeed, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who surprised the pundits by doing better than polls had forecasted across the map. Late Tuesday, Democratic recriminations had already begun to fly, with Reid's staff openly blaming the White House for Senate Democrats' losses in The Washington Post.

But Republicans also earned their win by capitalizing on their opportunities, rather than squandering them as they've often done in recent years. The GOP establishment rallied early to beat back Tea Party primary challengers, spending tens of millions of dollars but largely succeeding. No Senate incumbent lost a primary, and open-seat contenders viewed as fringe candidates were defeated or pushed out of contention across the board. The only high-profile primary defeat was the shocking June loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. In the place of past years' memorably batty GOP nominees, from Sharron Angle in 2010 to Todd Akin in 2012, was a polished, palatable class of Republicans whom voters could envision representing them in Washington.

The new Republican senators are quite conservative, perhaps more so than any previous class, but they are capable of sounding reasonable and staying focused on issues voters care about. The question yet to be answered is one of tactics: When these new players come to Washington, will they seek pragmatic accommodation? Or will they team up with the likes of Cruz, putting new faces on the same old gridlock?

(Image via Okyela/Shutterstock.com)

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Does Hillary Clinton Have Anything to Say?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:09:09 -0400

Everywhere Hillary Clinton goes, a thousand cameras follow. Then she opens her mouth, and nothing happens.

Clinton made a much-ballyhooed appearance in Iowa over the weekend, giving a speech widely noted for its substancelessness. She “had no explicit message of her own,” Politico noted, while The Economist pronounced it “underwhelming.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was so frustrated by Clinton’s lack of verve that he went on an extended rant about it, proclaiming, “I know her and like her, but she puts on that political hat and she’s a robot!” The coverage of Clinton’s speech seemed to contain more meditation about how anodyne she was than reporting of what she actually said.

The Iowa campaign speech that wasn’t a campaign speech (delivered at a "steak fry" that wasn’t a steak fry—the steaks are grilled) followed a year’s worth of nearly newsless Clintoniana. She wrote a book that reviewers unanimously described as stale and safe, valuable mostly for the hints it offered of her future positioning. Reviewing Henry Kissinger’s new book for The Washington Post a few weeks ago, Clinton boldly declared the need for “a real national dialogue” to “take on the perils and the promise of the 21st century,” while dodging any prescriptions of her own for today's vexing foreign-policy dilemmas. Last month, when Clinton caused a firestorm by telling my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg that President Obama’s foreign-affairs philosophy, “Don’t do stupid stuff,” was “not an organizing principle,” he pressed her to name a better one. “Peace, progress, and prosperity,” she said, as though that were any closer to being something you could organize a nation around.

That Clinton is a risk-averse, pragmatic politician has been her hallmark for years, of course—it’s just another way in which her current persona offers nothing new or surprising. Has America ever been so thoroughly tired of a candidate before the campaign even began?

On Thursday, I went to see Clinton in Washington, where she was speaking on a panel about women’s economic challenges at the Center for American Progress. Clinton boldly posited that people who work hard and do their best, particularly parents, deserve economic security. “We talk about a glass ceiling, but these women don’t even have a floor underneath them,” she said of workers who rely on tips. “This is not a women’s issue, this is a family issue, and it certainly is a children’s issue,” she added. “We have to do more to bring these issues to the forefront.”

When it was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s turn to speak, Clinton gazed out at the audience, nodding sagely, seeming to know that all the cameras were trained on her. A laundry list of well-worn leftish ideas, from raising the minimum wage to paid family leave and affordable childcare, was touted. Granted, these are substantive proposals, and they are controversial in some quarters. But they are broadly popular, and the overall message—that women ought to prosper—is almost impossible to disagree with. The discussion’s only spark came from Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, who made a rousing call to action. “I think we need a Rosie the Riveter moment for this generation!” Gillibrand said, to the event's only applause.

Gillibrand, who replaced Clinton in the Senate, has been ubiquitous lately as she promotes her new book. She has also been touted as a presidential candidate, but always demurs, saying she supports Clinton. Earlier this week, when I pressed her on what she’d say if Clinton doesn’t run, she pronounced the question irrelevant, as Clinton is clearly running. It was Clinton who originally inspired Gillibrand to want to run for office: An Asian Studies major at Dartmouth, Gillibrand was working at a law firm when Clinton gave her famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech in Beijing in 1995. The junior lawyer suddenly felt her path to be inadequate, she told me.

The story was a reminder that Clinton does inspire passion in some people, or did at one time. The Clinton-boosting super PAC Ready for Hillary has signed up more than 2.5 million supporters. Thousands flocked to the Iowa steak fry, if only to catch a glimpse of someone very famous. As Dave Weigel noted, Clinton's boringness is mostly a problem for the press, not the public.

On Thursday, Clinton rushed to echo Gillibrand’s statements. “Kirsten told stories—we could all tell stories about people we know who have been really egregiously impacted by the failure of our political leadership on the other side of the aisle,” she said after an anecdote about a woman whose career never recovered from taking time off to care for an injured child. To the “Rosie the Riveter” sentiment, she added, “We need people to feel that they’re part of a movement. It’s not just an election.”

Clinton is in a bind, as the political scientist Lynn Vavreck noted in The New York Times at the height of her understimulating book tour. “The only thing the tour is missing is the central element of a campaign: a raison d’etre, a vision,” Vavreck wrote. Clinton can’t talk about what she would do as the country’s leader without admitting that’s what she’s seeking to do. But will that change once she officially becomes a candidate? Based on the evidence, I wouldn't hold my breath.

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Will Republicans Shut Down the Government Again?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 16:02:38 -0400

The last government shutdown, almost a year ago, was no fun for anyone. Republicans in the House and Senate demanded that legislation to fund the government simultaneously defund Obamacare; Democrats refused to go along. In the ensuing 16-day stalemate, many functions of the federal government were forced to shutter. Federal workers were furloughed or worked without pay, children were disenrolled from Head Start, and the U.S. economy lost about $24 billion. Heartbreakingly, the annual Assateague Pony Roundup was canceled. Veterans were forced to commit civil disobedience and break into national monuments. (Okay, the shutdown was apparently fun for a few people: Nine months later, there were anecdotal reports of a D.C.-area baby boom.)

The shutdown was particularly hard on Republicans' image, as voters primarily blamed them for the chaos. Once it was over, the GOP seemed to have learned its lesson about the price of obstinacy. In December, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate negotiated a budget deal setting spending levels through 2015, and in January both houses easily approved the funding for it—the first time since 2009 Congress had passed a real budget rather than a temporary spending authorization known as a continuing resolution. A new era of rationality and calm seemed to have dawned.

But while the topline budget numbers set by the budget deal go through October 2015, the funding passed in January expires at the end of next month, on September 30. Both houses must pass new funding bills—likely in the form of a continuing resolution—to keep the government running. And that has raised the possibility of further shenanigans.

A well-placed House Republican source tells me GOP leadership is increasingly nervous about the potential for a rebellion on the funding bill. The small but influential hard core of House conservatives were emboldened by what happened earlier this month with the border bill: A proposal favored by Speaker John Boehner to address the border crisis with emergency funding and expedited deportations had to be pulled when conservatives, egged on by Senator Ted Cruz, revolted. The legislation the House passed instead had a smaller price tag and would bar President Obama from continuing his policy of allowing some young undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S. The Democrat-led Senate, meanwhile, did not manage to pass its own version of border legislation at all, so Congress failed to act on the issue.

House conservatives like Michele Bachmann and Steve King considered the episode a major victory. Bachmann called it a highlight of her career. Now, Republican leaders are worried that conservatives will not go along with a simple government-funding bill unless it reflects their priorities.

One possibility, raised by Senator Marco Rubio in an interview with Breitbart this week, is attaching to the funding bill a mechanism to stop Obama from taking executive action to liberalize immigration enforcement, as he has already done and threatens to do further. "There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a continuing-resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote on this," he told the publication. "I'm interested to see what kinds of ideas my colleagues have about using funding mechanisms to address this issue." Making government funding contingent on immigration-related legislation would instantly turn it into a highly charged partisan battle.

Another possibility is that reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank would be attached to the continuing resolution, either by Senate Democrats or by House Republican leadership. The formerly obscure lending fund has drawn the ire of the grassroots left and right, but mostly right, which charges that it constitutes a cronyistic corporate-welfare scheme. The bank's authorization runs out on September 30, the same day the federal government funding is set to expire. Business groups are lobbying hard for its renewal, but opposition has now gained momentum among conservatives: At this month's meeting of the Republican National Committee, a resolution opposing the bank was onlynarrowly defeated by the committee's members, 67 votes to 63. House conservatives might well refuse to agree to a government-funding bill that also reauthorizes the bank.

(Some recent coverage has also highlighted comments by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told Politico he planned to push through spending bills "with a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy." But McConnell was talking about what he would do if Republicans take the Senate next year. He was not referring to next month's legislation, which the pragmatic Kentuckian presumably wants to get passed as smoothly as possible.)

All this is highly speculative. Officially, Republicans insist there will be no drama, although they aren't yet saying what the plan is for getting the funding bill passed. "The last thing we're going to do is shoot ourselves in the foot and jeopardize our chances of winning the Senate and gaining seats in the House," a senior House GOP aide told me Wednesday. A top Senate Republican staffer agreed when I asked about a possible shutdown: "Absolutely not." Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee (and co-author of the budget agreement), told Business Insider, "No, there will not be a government shutdown"—although he then added, "If there is a government shutdown, it'll be because the Democrats brought it about."

Indeed, Democrats have ample incentive to stoke talk of a shutdown—or even to provoke one. Since last year's shutdown ended and the Obamacare rollout disaster ensued, their political fortunes have declined. On Wednesday, the Democrats' House campaign arm launched a website to remind the world that, prior to the 2013 shutdown, Republicans swore there was no possibility of such an outcome.

But not all Republicans are convinced the shutdown was such a disaster for them. A few weeks ago in Texas, I watched Cruz tell a roomful of conservative activists that the fight to defund Obamacare was actually a partial victory. "If you listen to Democrats, if you listen to the media—although I repeat myself—they will tell you that fight last summer and fall didn't succeed," he said. But, he asked, "Where are we now today?" The president's approval ratings are lower than ever, voters overwhelmingly dislike Obamacare, and Republicans have a chance at winning a dozen or more Senate seats. Rather than suffer a setback in the shutdown (which he did not mention), Cruz said, "I believe we have laid the foundation for winning the war to repeal Obamacare."

If conservatives buy Cruz's logic, which they tend to do, the prospect of another shutdown might not scare them much. And that could mean Congress is headed for trouble.

(Image via Flickr user Mount Rainier National Park)

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Why Rand Paul Loves to Fight Over Foreign Policy

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 09:54:08 -0400

Rand Paul sure seems to enjoy getting into it with his fellow Republicans. This week, the Kentucky senator has been feuding with Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who decried Paul’s “isolationism” in a weekend op-ed. Paul promptly and tartly fired back, saying of Perry, “Apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.” (Perry has been wearing the bold, hipsterish frames for about a year now. How rude of Paul not to have noticed.)

A similar dispute unfolded a few months ago, when Texas Senator Ted Cruzdepicted his foreign-policy vision as a Reaganesque happy medium between the extremes of Senator John McCain, on one pole, and Paul on the other. Not pleased to be used as a foil, Paul fired back with another op-ed in which he claimed Reagan’s legacy for his own and condemned “politicians who have never seen war talking tough for the sake of their political careers.”

Why is Paul so eager to have these fights? Sure, the others took their shots first, and Paul is only responding. But he’s also clearly seeking to elevate and call attention to his disputes with others in his party. The reason for that is also somewhat obvious: Paul is running for president—and he thinks he’s winning on this issue.

The Republican Party remains deeply divided over foreign policy. During the George W. Bush administration, the many Americans who turned against the Iraq war included a lot of Republicans. Today, 63 percent of Republicans believe the Iraq war wasn’t worth it, according to a recent poll. But of course, there's still a vocal contingent of hawkish Republicans who strongly disagree. Just as Cruz described it, the party is torn between the McCain wing that wants to see a more muscular posture for America abroad, even if it costs taxpayers money, and the Paul wing that wants to cut back on defense spending and foreign entanglements.

There has been no reckoning post-Bush between the two sides of this intraparty argument, as Chris Cillizza smartly notes. The party’s presidential nominees since Bush—McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012—were both on the McCain end of the spectrum; big donors like Sheldon Adelson and party elites, many of whom are Bush administration veterans, are largely in the hawks’ camp as well. But Paul believes that the base of the party—as the poll on Iraq and others suggest—is increasingly on his side. Perry may be trying to cozy up to the establishment by taking on Paul, aligning himself with those who see themselves as the party’s grown-up wing. But Paul believes he wins with the public, and with Republican primary voters, by articulating his noninterventionist views.

Paul is not, however, running a purely anti-establishment presidential campaign. Quite the contrary, he’s assiduously courted major donorsand party insiders, seeking to reassure them that he’s more grounded than his father, former member of Congress and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul. That’s why both his Perry and Cruz op-eds have, once you get past the name-calling, sought to emphasize common ground and rebut the "isolationist" charge. “Regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ... there is little difference among most Republicans on what to do,” he wrote in response to Cruz in March. “All of us believe we should stand up to Putin's aggression. Virtually no one believes we should intervene militarily.” Responding to Perry this week, Paul wrote, “Some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed .... Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.”

Despite the high-profile spats with fellow Republicans, Paul would surely argue he's trying not to deepen the party's divisions but to unite the GOP around common goals. In both pieces, Paul repeatedly invokes Reagan’s doctrine of “peace through strength” and makes the case that Reagan was less interventionist than many who invoke his name today. (As Peter Beinart notes in this trenchant analysis, Paul is both right and wrong about Reagan, whose foreign policy was quite aggressive even if it didn’t often involve boots on the ground.) He is seizing on every opportunity to clarify and explain a set of views that he sees as nuanced and commonsensical, and to defend them against the critique that they amount to mere withdrawal from the world.

Perhaps more interesting than this hawks-versus-libertarians dispute, which is an old argument, is who Paul’s antagonists have been. Both Perry and Cruz are politicians who’ve long been associated with the Tea Party, as Paul has. Perry, in his ill-fated 2012 campaign, warned of “military adventurism,” called for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and advocated cutting off aid to Pakistan. Cruz was lumped in with Paul in the category McCain derided as “wacko birds” after Paul’s 2013 drone filibuster. Yet both Perry and Cruz are anxious to differentiate themselves from Paul by turning him into a peacenik caricature. (As Dave Weigel points out, there is personal animosity behind the Perry-Paul spat.) Paul and his allies, for their part, tend to see a neoconservative conspiracy in the way he’s so often used as a punching bag. In an interview last year, Paul described his antagonists to me as “the perpetual war caucus,” and added, “I think much of their chagrin is they see that we’re winning. They’re on the losing side of history.”

Rand Paul is performing an admirable service for the Republican Party: forcing it to have an uncomfortable family conversation—airing an internal dispute that otherwise might get papered over. A confident and opportunistic politician, Paul is eager to take on his critics; by doing so, he believes he can rid the GOP of the stain of Bush’s policies and expand its appeal among voters alienated by Iraq.

On Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney unsurprisingly said he disagreed: “Rand Paul ... is basically an isolationist,” the former vice president said on ABC's "This Week." “That didn't work in the 1930s; it sure as heck won't work in the aftermath of 9/11.” Paul didn’t have to respond to this attack with yet another op-ed, because he already wrote it, a month ago. “Many of those clamoring for military action now are the same people who made every false assumption imaginable about the cost, challenge and purpose of the Iraq war,”Paul wrote. “They have been so wrong for so long. Why should we listen to them again?” A foreign-policy argument with the likes of Dick Cheney: You can be sure there’s no fight Paul would rather have.

(Image via Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)

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City and State Officials Are Getting More Skeptical of Privatization

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 12:08:40 -0400

A few years ago, Chicago residents accustomed to parking on the street got a rude shock. Parking-meter rates had suddenly gone up as much as fourfold. Some meters jammed and overflowed when they couldn't hold enough change for the new prices. In other areas, new electronic meters had been installed, but many of them didn't give receipts or failed to work entirely. And free parking on Sundays was a thing of the past.

The new meter regime sparked mass outrage. People held protests and threatened to boycott. But there was little recourse: The city had leased its 36,000 meters to a private Morgan Stanley-led consortium in exchange for $1.2 billion in up-front revenue. The length of the lease: 75 years.

If the meter situation seemed like a bad deal for Chicago's parkers, it would soon become clear that it was an even worse one for the city's taxpayers.

An inspector general's report found that the deal was worth at least $974 million more than the city had gotten for it. Not only would the city never have a chance to recoup that money or reap new meter revenue for three-quarters of a century, clauses buried in the contract required it to reimburse the company for lost meter revenue. The city was billed for allowing construction of new parking garages, for handing out disabled parking placards, for closing the streets for festivals. The current bill stands at $61 million, though Mayor Rahm Emanuel has refused to pay and taken the case to arbitration instead.

How did this happen? The meter deal passed the city council just four days after then-Mayor Richard Daley—desperate to fill a recession-caused budget hole—presented it. There were no public hearings, and the aldermen never saw the bid documents. Afterward, some aldermen who voted for it said they wished they'd known more of the details, but it was too late. "We're stuck with it for the next 71 years," Alderman Roderick Sawyer told me recently.

Sawyer, a South Side Democrat who was not in office when the meter deal passed, is trying to ensure similar proposals will get more scrutiny in the future. He has introduced an ordinance that would require more transparency, including public hearings and a comprehensive economic analysis, for any proposed city partnership with a private entity.

"This is just about the process," Sawyer said. "We're not saying all privatization deals are bad. But if we're going to do this, let's be honest with the public and let them know what's going to occur: It's going to save this much money, it's going to cost this many jobs."

Sawyer is not alone. In states and cities across the country, lawmakers are expressing new skepticism about privatization, imposing new conditions on government contracting, and demanding more oversight. Laws to rein in contractors have been introduced in 18 states this year, and three—Maryland, Oregon, and Nebraska—have passed legislation, according to In the Public Interest, a group that advocates what it calls "responsible contracting."

"We're not against contracting, but it needs to be done right," said the group's executive director, a former AFL-CIO official named Donald Cohen. "It needs to be accountable, transparent, and held to high standards for quality of work and quality of service." Cohen's organization, a national clearinghouse exclusively devoted to privatization issues, is the first advocacy group of its kind.

Doing it right, according to Cohen, means ensuring that contractors are subject to standards of transparency and accountability. Private companies doing government work and their contracts should be subject to open-records laws: In 2011, the city of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, hired a contractor to videotape city meetings, then claimed the tapes weren't public records. (A state appeals court eventually ruled otherwise.) Companies should be held responsible for cost overruns, and governments should be making sure they're actually saving money: Many private prisons cost more to operate than public ones, the group claims.

"We are definitely seeing a wave of states and some cities passing laws to get control of contracting," Cohen said. "There's still a lot of pressure to outsource, but the trend we see is people trying to fix the process and do it better, because of some of the high-profile failures at the federal and state levels."

The vogue for privatizing government began in the Reagan years, experts say, when an ascendant conservative ideology painted the public sector as a callous and sluggish bureaucracy and the private sector as inherently more innovative and efficient. The trend accelerated in the '90s, and today, Cohen estimates that $1 trillion of America's $6 trillion in annual federal, state, and local government spending goes to private companies.

Yet the public impression of privatization as a panacea for the inherent inefficiency of government has been tarnished in the intervening years. From Halliburton to Healthcare.gov to private prisons and welfare systems, contracting has often proved problematic. Perhaps mindful of these high-profile debacles, lawmakers are now more likely to view privatization and contracting proposals with skepticism. "The ideological fervor for privatization has ebbed," according to John D. Donahue, an expert on privatization at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Donahue, who has studied the issue since 1988, sees privatization as inherently neither good nor bad. Academic studies paint a mixed picture, he said. The private sector can deliver efficiencies when the task being sought is well defined, easy to measure, and subject to competition—mowing public parks, perhaps, or collecting trash.

But when the goals are fuzzier or competition is lacking, the picture gets cloudier. Is the purpose of municipal parking meters to maximize revenue, or is it to provide a low-cost amenity to citizens and the businesses they patronize? How do you value the various objectives of a prison system—justice, rehabilitation, social order—when the financial incentive is to lock more people up? In many cases, Donahue said, privatization and contracting save governments money not through increased efficiency but by undercutting public-sector wages and pensions or, as in the case of the parking meters, by effectively robbing the future to pay for the needs of the present. (By mid-2011, the city had spent all but $125 million of the $1.2 billion parking-meter payment.)

These are the kinds of questions policymakers are demanding answers to as they evaluate government contracts with an eye to getting the most bang for the taxpayer's buck. In Oregon, the legislature this month approved by overwhelming margins a bill tightening oversight of information-technology projects. It was an easy sell in the wake of the failure of the state's healthcare-exchange website, which was such a disaster it made Healthcare.gov look successful by comparison. To this day, Cover Oregon's website cannot accept online applications, forcing Oregonians to use paper applications or go through an insurance agent instead.

The new legislation will require third-party reviews of the quality of IT contractors' work. One of its sponsors, Representative Nancy Nathanson, a Democrat from Eugene, believes such a requirement might have prevented the exchange debacle had it been in place while the site was being developed. "I think it's important when you're spending public money, whoever is doing the work needs to have their books open," she told me. "We need to see how the money is spent. We need to see performance measures to determine whether something is working. We need accountability." In the next legislature, Nathanson plans to continue her push on contracting issues, she said.

Most of the privatization skeptics are Democrats, who tend to be sympathetic to the labor unions fighting to save public-sector jobs. (In the Public Interest is partly funded by unions, though Cohen said it has other funding sources, mainly foundations, and operates independently.) When California Governor Jerry Brown proposed, in his latest budget plan, to "reduce [the state's] reliance on contractors" by bringing formerly outsourced functions back in-house, critics largely saw the move as a sop to labor.

But some Republicans have also turned against privatization out of a desire for fiscal responsibility. In Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich recentlyabandoned his push to lease the Ohio Turnpike to a private operator, deciding instead to have the state issue bonds backed by future toll revenue. The decision may have been influenced by the experience of nearby Indiana, which leased a 157-mile state road to an Australian-Spanish consortium and drew public criticism when toll rates doubled in five years. As with the Chicago meters, the government quickly spent most of its lump-sum payment and now faces decades bound by a restrictive contract that gives it little control over a major roadway.

"Privatization has potential rewards, but a lot of it is really just about shifting money around for political reasons," said Phineas Baxendall, a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and author of a report on toll roads called Private Roads, Public Costs. "There are a lot of dangers in terms of loss of control over public policy, not getting enough revenue for these assets, as well as a lack of transparency."

Many of the ideological proponents of privatization are libertarian conservatives who believe tasks like operating roads and schools are better performed by the private sector. But in Texas, one of the most prominent activists against private toll roads is a San Antonio Tea Party activist named Terri Hall. She has started a petition to change the city charter to require that any toll project be put to a vote, and she blogs relentlessly on toll-related issues. "If there's anything Texans hate, it's big government and cronyism, and toll roads deliver both," she wrote recently.

A worry about handing over American public assets to foreign companies also crosses partisan lines. Last month, the Republican-dominated Nebraska legislature passed, and Republican Governor Dave Heineman signed, a bill to increase transparency in state contracting by requiring contractors to report where the money was going—whether the goods and services the state was purchasing were coming from Nebraska, from other states, or from foreign countries.

"We're spending close to $2 billion on contracts out of a roughly $8 billion budget," said Heath Mello, the Democratic state senator who authored the bill. "The public and the legislature need to know where our contracting dollars are going and whether the state of Nebraska is seeing any economic benefit." Nebraska lawmakers may also be warier of privatization since the state's effort to privatize its foster-care system fell apart amid scandal in 2012.

Privatization proponents say contracting horror stories are overblown. Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform for the free-market Reason Foundation and editor of its comprehensive Annual Privatization Report, noted that other cities, such as Indianapolis, followed Chicago's lead by privatizing their parking meters without a problem. (On the other hand, other cities, such as Pittsburgh, shied away from privatizing their meters.) "Is privatization a magic wand? Is it always going to come in and save you money? No," Gilroy said. "You have to do this well. You have to do your due diligence. You have to do a good contract and then you have to monitor and enforce that contract."

In this, Gilroy would seem to be on the same page as advocates of "responsible contracting." But he suspects that the real agenda of In the Public Interest and the recent state legislative initiatives isn't to improve contracting but to make it more difficult by creating bureaucratic obstacles. He pointed to the group's collaboration with unions on a resolution that recently passed the California Assembly. Though nonbinding, the resolution's decree that the body "opposes outsourcing of public services and assets" drew an outcry from businesses and local governments, including the California League of Cities.

"What seems to be underlying this is an outright hostility to outsourcing," Gilroy said.

In Chicago, Alderman Sawyer's accountability ordinance has yet to advance out of the Rules Committee. Emanuel criticized the parking-meter deal during his mayoral campaign and promised "an era of reform," but as mayor, with the power to push the bill forward, he has yet to take a position on it. Sawyer says he has had "fruitful conversations" with the mayor's administration and is hopeful Emanuel will back the measure soon. Emanuel's office refused a request for comment on the ordinance.

Even if the ordinance goes nowhere, Sawyer believes Chicago may have learned its lesson about privatization. Prior to the meter deal, the city was one of the country's most enthusiastic proponents of privatization. Daley leased the Chicago Skyway toll road for $1.8 billion and privatized city functions from towing to lawnmowing. But in the five years since the parking fiasco, Chicago policymakers have become more skeptical: A proposal to privatize Midway Airport—which would have made it the first privately run major airport in the country—went down after it was subjected to aggressive scrutiny.

"They analyzed the deal themselves," Sawyer said. "And they determined that it was not worth doing."

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What Is Joe Biden Up To?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 11:18:01 -0500

Vice President Joe Biden's speech to the Democratic National Committee on Thursday included a paean to long shots and lost causes. "Everything I've ever done in my career that I consider worthwhile—from the Violence Against Women Act to the crime bill to helping get us out of Iraq—it took time," he said. "If we didn't start when we started ... it would have never happened."

It seemed an apt metaphor for Biden's political predicament. Most people believe that the 71-year-old vice president, who has twice unsuccessfully sought the presidency, has little chance of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2016. But Biden believes you don't know what you can accomplish until you try. As he said on Thursday—the ostensible topic was improving the economy through infrastructure: "I don't want to hear people telling me that we can't get that done now."

In recent weeks, Biden has been off the leash. On Monday, he was a guest on Seth Meyers' Late Night hosting debut; Amy Poehler sat on his lap and called him a "gorgeous charm monster," and Biden teased about a "major announcement" that he'd decided not to make just yet. On Tuesday,schmoozing the ladies of The View, Biden touted his accomplishments, said he considered himself "uniquely qualified," and gave this answer about a potential run: "I absolutely have not said no."

What is Biden up to? For one, he is casting off the shackles of the Obama team's attempts to control and box him in, as Glenn Thrush reports in a rich and delightful profile in Politico Magazine this week. Thrush's piece is, among other things, a detailed account of the litany of humiliations Biden has had to endure at the hands of an administration that has never taken him as seriously as he felt he deserved. The Democratic base has reason to love Biden beyond his goofy "Uncle Joe" image. As vice president, he has often been the point man for progressive causes, from forcing Obama to come out in favor of gay marriage to carrying the administration's gun-control agenda. But the Obamans have seriously restricted his ability to lay 2016 groundwork, and some—including 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina—have already lent support to the Hillary Clinton campaign-in-waiting.

"Everybody wants to talk about 2016. That's lifetimes away," Biden proclaimed Thursday. But in the timetable of politics, it's not far off at all. Clinton has said she will decide whether to run sometime this year. The Republicans angling for their party's nomination have stepped up their jostling. With Clinton's plans still unknown, it would seem that if a Biden-for-president trial balloon is to catch a sudden fluke of an updraft, now would be the time.

There's no doubt that Biden wants to be president—he's wanted it basically his entire life—or that 2016 would be his last, best chance, based on his age and his current position. Whether he will run is a different question. A New York Times/CBS News poll this week found an overwhelming 82 percent of Democrats want Clinton to run. Biden came in second, with 42 percent. But compare those numbers with the fluid and fractured Republican field: The potential candidacy Republicans most want to see, that of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, is sought by just 41 percent of GOP voters.

Democrats really like Joe Biden. They just like Hillary Clinton better. And though they note that 2008's divisive Obama-Clinton primary didn't hurt the party that November, there seems to be little appetite for an intraparty fight in 2016. The Democratic Party leaders from around the country who gathered for this week's DNC meeting received Biden with deep enthusiasm for his message about mobilizing for this year's congressional elections, lifting up the middle class, and drawing a stark contrast with Republican proposals. But they stopped short of saying they'd put him ahead of Clinton for the nomination.

"I absolutely love Joe Biden," Mame Reiley, a committee member from Virginia, told me. "But if Hillary wants it, it's her time. If she wants to do it, I'm going to support her." If Clinton decides against it, on the other hand, Biden is busy making sure he's well positioned to capitalize.

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Appointment-palooza in the Senate? Don't Bet on It

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 13:18:51 -0500

There are 231 presidential nominations waiting to be confirmed by the Senate. Now that Democrats have changed the filibuster rules—last week's invocation of the "nuclear option"—those are all going to sail through, right? The Senate will be one non-stop confirmation party until every federal judicial chamber, Cabinet-agency desk, ambassadorship, and oversight board is occupied by a liberal Obama appointee! Flowers will bloom and music will play in the Capitol as Harry Reid presents "Appointmentpalooza"!

Not quite.

While the White House and Senate Democrats anticipate seeing a handful of high-profile appointees confirmed in the next month, even advocates hailing the new rules don't expect the "nuclear" change to provoke a wholesale thaw in the appointment process. That's because the filibuster—the threat to extend debate on a motion (which previously required 60 votes to shut down, and now requires just 51 for most nominations)—wasn't the only bottleneck in the long and convoluted process of getting presidential appointments through the Senate. So while Reid, the majority leader, chastised Republicans for "deny[ing] the president his team," President Obama's bench isn't likely to be suddenly flooded with new players. And liberals expecting the nuclear option to be a panacea for ending obstruction are likely to be disappointed.

According to statistics kept by the White House, the pending nominations include 178 executive nominees and 53 judicial nominees. Reid pulled the "nuclear" trigger out of frustration that three appointees to the D.C. Circuit Court were being blocked: Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, and Robert Wilkins. Immediately after changing the rules, Reid successfully advanced Millett's nomination to a floor vote—but she still hasn't been confirmed, because nothing is that easy in the Senate. In December, Democrats hope to move those three through to confirmation, along with proposed Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Federal Housing Finance Agency head Mel Watt. (Watt has been waiting more than 200 days to be confirmed, the second longest of any executive nominee currently on the floor.)

But the fact that those six nominees could take a month to clear the Senate, even without a 60-vote threshold, is a good indication of the time it could take to clear the rest of the backlog. "Democrats sold this [change] as 'We need to speed things up to make the Senate work,' but nothing they did speeds anything up or makes anything faster," Don Stewart, the deputy chief of staff to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told me. "The notion that this will make the Senate run better or faster is a complete and utter falsehood."

McConnell, of course, bitterly opposed the rule change. But Democrats and filibuster-reform advocates don't totally disagree with Stewart. The fact that they don't have the votes to block a nominee at the end of the process might give Republicans less incentive to erect time-consuming obstacles along the way, they say. But it doesn't get rid of the mechanisms for doing so.

"The question is, are nominations going to move any more quickly now that [the majority doesn't] have to worry about getting a 60-vote supermajority at the end of the game?" says Sarah Binder, a Senate expert at George Washington University and the Brookings Institution. The answer, she said, remains to be seen. "There are still some elements built into committee practices that give power to individual members of the minority."

Most people, let's face it, are not that interested in Senate procedure, myself included. But the filibuster has gained popular traction as an issue because it symbolizes, to Democrats, the way Republicans who object to Obama on purely partisan grounds have tried to prevent him from getting his way. Republicans dispute the idea that Obama has faced more than the usual level of obstruction, and the facts—including what constitutes a filibuster and how to measure obstruction—are confusing and open to interpretation and spin.

But whether Obama will, in fact, get to put his "team" in place is an important question. As Jonathan Chait has noted, the president has largely given up on getting legislation through Congress; his legacy now rests on what his executive agencies will be able accomplish, from labor-law implementation to environmental regulation, and what precedents his judicial nominees will set over the course of their lifetime appointments. If you're interested in this question, it's worth understanding how it all works—and doesn't work—and why it will still be a tough and lengthy process for Obama to get all his appointees through.

1. Many vacancies don't have a nominee. It seems obvious: You can't appoint someone to a position if you don't suggest someone for the job. But of the 112 current judicial vacancies, more than half—59—lack a nominee, according to the liberal Alliance for Justice. Republicans often cite this fact to claim that it's really the Obama Administration leaving posts unfilled. But Democrats blame Republicans: In the case of judicial nominees, it is customary for the administration to secure the approval of the senators from the nominee's home state. In the current climate of partisan noncooperation, this consultation is often denied. Liberals suspect that, in the words of Brookings Institution fellow Russell Wheeler, "Republican senators are, on an unprecedented scale, objecting to nominees floated by the administration, insisting on nominees unacceptable to the administration, or simply slow-walking the process—and threatening to exploit their ability to deny hearings to nominees from their states if the administration nominates someone to whom they object."

2. Many nominees are still in committee. Of the 231 nominees proposed by the White House but not yet confirmed by the Senate, 76 have been voted out of their respective committees; the rest are waiting for a committee to approve them. (Nominees go through different committees depending on their final destination; judges, for example, go through the Judiciary Committee.) Since Democrats are the Senate majority, they are also the majority of members of each committee, and getting a nominee out of committee requires a simple majority vote. So what's the hold-up?

This is where the consultation with red-state senators comes in. Each home-state senator is sent a "blue slip" with the potential nominee's name on it, and the nominee doesn't come to the committee for a hearing until both "blue slips" are returned. In many cases, Republicans simply don't turn in their slips. Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, could ditch this custom—many filibuster-reform advocates are demanding it, noting the large number of years-long vacancies in states like Texas—but he hasn't so far. The blue-slip problem is unaffected by the recent rules change.

3. The nominees on the floor can still take a looong time to get confirmed. Once a nomination is voted out of committee, the majority leader can bring it up for a confirmation vote if the Senate gives its unanimous consent. But if a single senator objects, the consent isn't unanimous. These one-senator blockades are known as "holds" and can be totally secret. McConnell's staff will tell Reid's staff that consent won't be given for a particular nominee, and unless the objector goes public, Democrats won't know who objects or why. Without unanimous consent, the only way for Reid to get to a vote is to invoke cloture. Until recently, that cloture vote took 60 votes to succeed; thanks to Reid's change last week, it now takes only 51 votes. (This is where the confusion about the definition of "filibuster" comes in. Republicans point to the relatively few occasions on which Democrats have failed to get 60 votes after invoking cloture; Democrats consider a nominee to have been blocked if Reid is forced to invoke cloture because consent was denied.)

Post-nuclear option, these types of holds will no longer be an obstacle to most nominations. (Remember, 60 votes are still required to cut off debate on legislation and for Supreme Court nominees—although a Supreme Court nominee has never been filibustered.) No matter how many Republicans object, Reid can proceed to confirmation by invoking cloture, as long as most Democrats support him. But it's still a cumbersome process. After cloture is invoked, there's a day-long waiting period, and then a set number of hours set aside for "debate." (Most of the time, senators don't actually debate or even show up during these periods; they just wait for the clock to run out.) It varies according to the type of nominee, but it can be up to 30 hours—which, since the Senate only meets for a few hours and not every day, means it can easily take a week to get a single nominee from the floor through to confirmation. That's why, while Reid successfully invoked cloture on Millett's nomination last week, she isn't yet a judge—the Senate left town for Thanksgiving before her waiting and debate period could elapse and the final vote could be held to confirm her.

So there you have it: More than you probably wanted to know about confirmations and Senate procedure. It's a topsy-turvy world in which most "filibusters" aren't actually filibusters, most "blocks" are really delays, and "blue slips" may be a bigger problem than the one Harry Reid solved by going nuclear.

The upshot is this: The nuclear option removed one big bottleneck from the confirmation process, the minority's ability to prevent nominations by invoking the 60-vote threshold. But two other big bottlenecks—the administration's difficulty putting up nominees for red-state judgeships and getting them through committee—remain. And even when those are surmounted, the process will still be lengthy and cumbersome. Nominations may well be the key to Obama's second-term agenda, but they're not about to suddenly sail through the Senate.

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Would a Government Shutdown Really Be All That Bad for Republicans? Yes

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 12:04:53 -0400

Go ahead, shut it down! That's the new cheer from the conservatives pushing to defund Obamacare. To their lily-livered compatriots who worry that the Senate will reject the defunding gambit, resulting in a shutdown when the federal government runs out of money at the end of this month, they claim that wouldn't actually be so bad: Americans, they say, would cheer the Republicans for sticking to their principles and opposing the unpopular health-care legislation.

It's a case increasingly being made by activists on the right, who cite polling data and a revisionist view of the 1995 government shutdown. But under close scrutiny, the claims don't hold up.

The contention that Americans would cheer a shutdown rests on a newRasmussen Reports poll that supposedly shows a majority of Americans favor shutting down the government to defund Obamacare. It was emailed to me by a conservative activist, Scott Hogenson, who wrote, "RE: Obamacare and the prospect of a government shutdown. Seems a majority of Americans would be okay with that."

Rasmussen isn’t a very reliable pollster -- in last year’s presidential election, the company’s polls consistently overestimated Mitt Romney’s chances. But leaving that aside, the poll doesn’t quite show that the public wants defund or nothing. The pollster asked, “Would you rather have Congress avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending for the health care law at existing levels or would you rather have a partial government shutdown until Democrats and Republicans agree on what spending for that law to cut?,” and 51 percent picked the second option, which suggests a partial trimming of health-care spending. Another recent poll by a respected Republican pollster found that a large majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, oppose “shutting down the government as a way to defund the president’s health care law.”

Read more at The Atlantic.

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The Democratic Congressman Who Thinks He Can Stop the Syria War

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 11:59:58 -0400

A "conscience vote": That's the congressional euphemism for an issue on which partisan loyalties are so scrambled that lawmakers must make up their own minds. Both Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner have used the term to describe the authorization of military force in Syria, meaning they won't be "whipping," or pressuring members to vote a certain way.

But one Democratic congressman will be whipping -- against the resolution. Alan Grayson, the Florida liberal and civil-libertarian, has been rallying opposition to the use of force both among his colleagues and among the public. He believes the momentum is on his side and the authorization is doomed to fail in the House.

I interviewed Grayson about his effort and his view of the issue Tuesday. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

You started an online petition against intervention in Syria. Do you think it's gaining traction?

Yes, we've gotten 25,000 signatures in just a couple of days. It's a sign not only that the public is against attacking Syria, but also that they're willing to do something about it. [Ed. note: As of Wednesday afternoon, it was nearly 35,000.] We're seeing not only a lot of opposition in terms of numbers, but also a great deal of intensity. It's an unusual thing to post a petition online, not do anything to promote it, and see almost instantly 25,000 people sign up. We're going to put that to good use. We're going to have people calling their congressman and sending emails. In the case of congressmen who are on the fence, they'll hear from huge numbers of their constituents who want them to vote "no," and it's going to have a dramatic impact.

You also say you're going to whip your colleagues. Has that effort started?

We have started it. The first thing we have done is very carefully keeping track of what our what colleagues actually say about this. A very substantial number of Democrats and Republicans have come out against attacking Syria, and we have begun the process of informing our Democratic colleagues about what their other colleagues are saying. We're circulating a letter that quotes a dozen other Democrats in Congress, as well as me, who have stated their reasons against an attack. That's the first step in what will be a very sophisticated process of persuading our open-minded colleagues on both sides of aisle.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Obama's Immigration Nuclear Option: Stopping Deportations Unilaterally

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 14:00:00 -0400

The biggest obstacle facing immigration reform may be not opposition but inertia. Leaders of the House of Representatives have said they plan to act, but with the coming months likely to be consumed by budget drama, immigration could fall by the wayside.

If that happens, advocates of immigration reform have another idea: They’ll push Obama to press the button on the immigration-reform nuclear option.

The option commonly referred to by immigration reformers as “Plan B” would see the president take executive action to prevent undocumented immigrants from being deported -- along the lines of the deferred-action program the administration created for “Dreamers” last year. It wouldn’t be a panacea, and it wouldn’t give them citizenship. But such an action could at least spare some from the constant threat of deportation. And perhaps just as important, it could exact major political revenge on Republicans, galvanizing the Hispanic electorate against them and further hurting their image with the fastest-growing segment of voters.

The Case for Impeaching Obama

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:42:53 -0400

There’s a hot new idea sweeping the conservative grassroots: impeaching the president.

Republican members of Congress home for the August recess have been pressured by their constituents on the subject at town halls across the country. Indeed, if Democrats thought that President Obama, having produced his original birth certificate and gotten himself easily reelected, might have finally put to rest the right-wing conviction of his illegitimacy, the opposite seems to have occurred: In certain conservative precincts, the determination to oust him is stronger than ever.

At a meeting of a local Republican club in Michigan last week, a woman asked Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, “Who is going to stop Obama from everything that he’s doing against our Constitution?”, while a man chimed in, “Articles of impeachment!” Bentivolio responded, “If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true. I feel your pain.” But, he said, he didn’t have the evidence.

Read the full story at TheAtlantic.com.

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Analysis: Here's Who Is Really to Blame for Sequestration

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:31:55 -0500

Patty Murray. Jon Kyl. Max Baucus. Rob Portman. John Kerry. Pat Toomey.

These six senators from both parties, along with six members of the House of Representatives, are the people to blame for the sequestration cuts scheduled to hit the federal budget beginning Friday. And yet in the energetic round of finger-pointing that has consumed Washington in recent days, their names have hardly been mentioned.

They are the former members of the so-called "supercommittee" -- the bipartisan crew that, back in 2011, was given four months to propose $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. It was their failure to come together that created the current mess. Today, Republicans are focused on pinning sequestration on President Obama, who came up with the idea, while Obama has pointed the finger at Congress, which voted for it on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis. But that's silly. Nobody who "agreed" to sequestration actually wanted it to happen. In classic Washington fashion, they thought they could assign the hard work to somebody else and get them to do it. They were wrong.

It's Been 951 Days Since the Senate Passed a Major New Law

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 11:22:51 -0500

Here's an impressive fact about life in today's Washington: The last time a major new piece of policy legislation passed the U.S. Senate was July 15, 2010.

That's when the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill came through the Senate. And it was 951 days ago.

If you're wondering whether President Obama's ambitious second-term agenda has a chance to make it through Congress, this little fact might be worth keeping in mind. Pessimistic analyses of the prospects for the Obama agenda have mostly focused on the recalcitrant, GOP-led House of Representatives. But Obama's problem may actually be with the house of Congress his party controls. House Speaker John Boehner has signaled that he'll consider proposals that make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate. Based on recent history, that could be a tall order.

Lest you think this is about Republican obstruction of the Democrats' Senate majority via the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome, that's only part of the problem. Note that this period of inaction doesn't quite correlate with the last time Democrats had 60 votes, which was January 2010. And the Senate has actually done plenty of things in the past two years and seven months -- the deals that ended the 2011 debt-ceiling fight and the recent "fiscal cliff," for example, as well as contentious items like the highway bill and the reapproval of the Export-Import Bank.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Is Washington getting less dysfunctional?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:34:50 -0500

Don't look now, but things are actually getting done in Washington, D.C.

Witness the last month: We didn't go over the fiscal cliff. We averted (at least for the moment) adebt-ceiling standoff. On Monday, Congress passed, with barely any drama, aid for victims ofHurricane Sandy. And the bipartisan push for comprehensive immigration reform seems to be going awfully well.

Could Washington really be getting less dysfunctional? Are we seeing an abatement of the constant rancor and gridlock that have so defined Congress in recent years? And if we were, would we even know what it looked like?

Consider the case of immigration reform. On Monday, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a legislative framework that would create a path to citizenship while tightening border security. The "Gang of Eight" are a truly disparate group of individuals, spanning the far right (Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio) and far left (Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin), brought together by their shared interest in addressing a stubborn but politically sensitive issue.

This is something Washington politicians used to do, or so I've read. It was called leading. Taking political risks to advance policy. Finding common ground, putting partisanship aside, and all those hoary bromides we've learned to roll our eyes at, because they aren't supposed to happen anymore.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Obama's permanent campaign: Can he use his reelection playbook to change Washington?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:47:54 -0500

A week ago, President Obama launched his second term with a set of lofty goals -- climate change legislation, immigration reform, and gun control among them.

Around the same time, Obama's former campaign apparatus announced it would morph into a new group called Organizing for Action, a nonprofit group to promote Obama's policy goals.

The inaugural address's ambitious promises have been pronounced far-fetched; the new nonprofit has been viewed as an intriguing sidelight. But taken together, Organizing for Action could be the key to enacting the president's agenda. Obama's best hope for his aggressive program may lie in the same innovative campaign techniques of grassroots mobilization and data-based field organizingthat got him reelected in November. And if he pulls it off, he could revolutionize lawmaking the way he's already revolutionized campaigns.

Politicians talk about an outside game, but no president has ever commanded a standing army of organized supporters who could be summoned at a moment's notice to put pressure on Washington at his command. That is what Obama is proposing to do, said Addisu Demissie, who served as political director of Organizing for America, the heir to Obama's 2008 campaign organization.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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What Americans Want From a Fiscal-Cliff Deal

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

With lawmakers getting down to business on a fiscal-cliff deal, interest groups are working overtime to tell the politicians what voters want them to do.

This matters a lot, obviously; all else being equal, politicians are much more likely to take stands they believe to be political winners. But when it comes to concocting the perfect blend of tax hikes and spending cuts, what the people want is not perfectly clear.

This week, a fight has broken out between Democratic groups over whether there is a popular mandate for entitlement reform. Each has fresh, credible polling data to support its position. On the one hand, a group of labor unions says that a clear majority of Americans don't want any cuts to Social Security or Medicare; on the other hand, the centrist-Democratic think tank Third Way aserts that even a majority of President Obama's supporters support a bipartisan compromise to fix those programs.

In the Third Way poll of 800 Obama voters -- conducted post-election by the Benenson Strategy Group, which also polls for the president -- 79 percent said that the president and Congress should "make changes to fix Social Security and Medicare." But in the poll of 1,000 general-election voters conducted for three unions -- the NEA, SEIU, and AFSCME -- by the prominent Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, 87 percent opposed cuts to Social Security, and 80 percent were against cuts to Medicare. Large majorities also opposed cutting education funding, college aid, and unemployment benefits. In the Third Way poll, 69 percent said the deficit was a major problem; in the unions' survey, just 29 percent wanted Congress and the president to focus on reducing the deficit.

What's going on here? In short, clever polling. Both surveys were carefully constructed to elicit the answers they wanted. The Third Way poll, for example, asked voters if they wanted politicians to "compromise" and "make changes" -- it didn't mention "cuts," and it didn't dig into the specifics of any proposed "changes" to entitlement programs. When you keep it vague like that, of course people will agree. But the answer is almost meaningless: Do people want entitlements to change to be more generous, or do they want the sort of private account or voucher-based systems Paul Ryan has proposed? This poll doesn't tell us.

The unions' poll, meanwhile, didn't ask about deficits in isolation -- it counterposed deficit reduction with "creating jobs" and gave people a binary choice between the two. Again, given this choice, it's almost a given that respondents will pick "job creation" as their preferred priority, and indeed, 67 percent did. But how do people want this job creation to be accomplished? Chances are if you replaced that phrase with "government spending," which is what's really meant by the question, you'd get a different answer, and if you dug down into specifics on how to create jobs, you'd likely get far less unanimity.

It's clear what both of these groups are trying to do. Third Way wants politicians to think that even Democrats want to rein in entitlement spending, when that's pretty clearly not the case. The unions want politicians to think voters don't care about deficits, when that's also pretty clearly not the case.

So what do the American people really want out of a deal to resolve the fiscal cliff? It's best to turn to a poll that doesn't come from an interest group for the answer. National Journal's Congressional Connection polling series, conducted by Princeton Survey Research, has asked a number of detailed questions on fiscal issues and the budget in recent months. Here's what it found:

Do voters want to reduce the deficit? Yes, but they care more about jobs and education. Three-quarters of respondents call reducing the deficit "very important," but an even larger majority, 86 percent, say that addressing the job situation is very important, and 76 percent say the same about improving public education.

Do voters want entitlement cuts? Nope. A slim majority, 51 percent, say that keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits untouched is more important than reducing the deficit (34 percent). A plurality, 36 percent, say the idea that Medicare and Social Security could be cut is their biggest worry about any deficit deal; raising their taxes was the concern of 24 percent. A majority also said that raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 should not be part of the deal, and a plurality, 49 percent, didn't want Medicare and Medicaid spending to be limited. Voters also don't want to see a freeze on domestic nondefense spending on things like education, parks, and housing, by 57 percent to 35 percent.

There's one thing that voters clearly do want: higher taxes on the wealthy. All of these polls -- the Third Way survey, the unions' poll, the National Journal questionnaire -- found majority support for raising taxes on incomes over $250,000, a conclusion also found in the presidential-election exit poll and plenty of other surveys. The politicians seem to have absorbed this: Democrats, led by Obama, have made upper-income tax hikes their central demand, and Republicans, while resisting a top-bracket rate hike, are talking about other ways to increase taxes, such as limiting deductions and closing loopholes.

Voters also seem enthusiastic about cuts to defense spending, although remarkably few pollsters ask this question. A Gallup Poll in February found that a plurality, 41 percent, think the federal government spends too much on national defense and the military; 32 percent said that defense spending was about right, while just 24 percent said it was too little -- a marked contrast to both parties' slavish devotion to maintaining or increasing military budgets. A detailed survey commissioned in May by the Center for Public Integrity dug into voters' views on this topic and found even broader agreement for a wide variety of cuts to the Pentagon.

There's one more point of public consensus: People want lawmakers to do something. In the National Journal survey, 63 percent wanted lawmakers to compromise, and a plurality, 45 percent, thought there was still time to get a deal done by the end of the year (40 percent were OK with deferring a deal until next year). If something doesn't get done, they'll blame congressional Republicans (18 percent) slightly more than the president (10 percent) or congressional Democrats (8 percent), but most (61 percent) say they'll blame all parties equally.

In short: The people want a deal to avert the fiscal cliff. They want it to combine tax increases and spending cuts. But the devil, as ever, is in the details.

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