The Liberal Counterweight

A new AP-GFK poll is out which I find extremely interesting. The polls seems to show voters profoundly contradicting themselves. The first question asks whether the individual would rather vote for their Representative or for someone else.The poll finds voters choose another politician by an 18-point margin. This clearly means Democrats are in trouble. The Democratic Party controls the House of Representatives by a 17.8% margin. One could assume this means the voters want the House to fall back into Republican control. However, the poll also says reveals voters want the Democrats to retain control of Congress by a 7 percent margin. 

What on Earth does this mean? One way of looking at it is the voters are extremely unsatisfied with their current Representative or Senator. This fits well into the media's anti-incumbent narrative, however, falls short of its anti-Democrat narrative. After all, the voters clearly want the Democrats to retain control of congress. Voters just do not want the same Democrats representing them. That is why they choose the Republican party. Pundits have been forgetting the Republican Party's favorability ratings have been far below that of the Democrats, though they often do come out ahead in the generic Congressional ballot. 

This further illustrates the critical flaw of Obama's anti-insurgent political strategy. When he tries to force candidates such as Andrew Romanoff and Joe Sestak out of their respective primaries, he is resigning his governing coalition to defeat. Congressional primary challenges offer the voters to decide for whom they would like to vote in the general election. Deny them this chance, and they will choose the true outsider. In this case, it is the Republican they will choose. 

While the Senate argues itself hoarse about the mythical "carbon tax" which is not even being considered, the European Union is reducing its carbon emissions at an astonishingly fast rate. This is in no small part because of its emissions trading scheme, though it can also be attributed to its outstanding public transit system. Europe has been leading the charge on public transit for decades, building some of the fastest trains in the world. The investments Western Europe has made in high speed rail have even undermined the airline industry's hold on international European travel. Automobile use in much of the European Union is below the global average, and is mostly focused on short distance travel. 

The public transportation system of Europe is astronomically superior to its American counterpart. The only federally owned passenger rail system is Amtrak, which is known for its massive funding problems and inefficiency. Local subway lines have not been expanded for years. Many of them are crumbling as funds are not allocated properly for their maintenance. The results of this massive failure of public transportation has produced adverse consequences for the American way of life. Suburban sprawl has resulted, further cementing the car as the primary mode of transportation. Airline travel is the only easy way to get in between major cities. 

There are many adverse effects this has had on the economy and the environment, though the most pressing is the dependence on foreign oil. We send billions of dollars to the Middle East for every day we overuse automobiles and airplanes. It is like a giant hole in our economy, sucking money into it and throwing it into the hands of supporters of terrorism, among other people. I won't go into the detail of why dependence on oil is bad for our economy. The biggest problem people have with plans for a large scale transition to public transportation is the cost to the taxpayer. Supplying the country with a high speed rail network would take hundreds of billions of dollars. Where would this money come from, people ask. The answer: the fuel tax. The fuel tax is done through either an excise tax or a VAT (value added tax). In many countries both are used. This is the case for much of the European Union, which has the highest fuel taxes in the world. 

The graph above shows the fuel tax of several EU countries and the United States. As you can see, the United States has a far lower gas tax than any of the other countries represented. The reason these countries have such good public transit systems is because they have such high fuel taxes. It is very difficult to have both a good public transit system AND a car-based transportation system. The fuel tax has the added benefit of encouraging people to take the public transportation they are paying for, increasing the fiscal solvency of those systems. Because the ridership is so high, the systems have the ability to expand and make themselves more reliable. 

In the United States, there is a common habit of bashing all things public because they are inefficient. Public institutions are only as good as the funding which is provided for them. If Amtrak had more funding and a higher demand, it would have the resources to improve it. One thing is for sure, the United States cannot keep using cars as the primary means of transportation and the best way to change that is raising the fuel tax.

Teagan Goddard reports Hillary Clinton has signaled the Justice Department will be filing a legal challenge to the Arizona immigration law. President Obama has signaled repeatedly he strongly opposes the tough new Arizona immigration law which many claim encourages racial profiling by police. There is no easy way for him to directly overturn it. The easier of the two possible options is challenging the constitutionality of the law. The harder of these, arguably, would be to push for congressional action on the issue. President Obama has chosen the easier of the two. 

Assuming Hillary Clinton is correct in her assertion that a legal challenge will be mounted, where does that leave opponents of the law? The constitutional grounds on which the law is based are shaky at best. The power of Congress to dictate foreign policy is specified in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. The States are not responsible for determining immigration policy. If the case makes its way to the Supreme Court of the United States, it is likely to fall in favor of the Administration. The Supreme Court, though far more conservative than 20 years ago, is still relatively liberal on most matters of immigration. 

Nonetheless, this will be an interesting conflict to watch unfold. In the end, however, it is likely the Arizona law will be found unconstitutional and struck down.

President Obama did not fall short or exceed expectations here. What he was trying to do, and what his entire Administration has been trying to do, is show he has some command over the situation when there is little he can ultimately do. Unless the leak is contained, the disaster will only deteriorate further. Obama has no control over the oil spill. He did lay out the things his Administration could do: reforming the Minerals Management Service, creating an independent fund to compensate those affected by the spill, and the mobilization of 17,000 National Guard troops. This is above and beyond what is expected of him as President. 

His clean energy push was very weak, however. When he talked about the "costs" associated with the transition to a green economy, he was buying into the conservative narrative that regulating carbon will cost jobs. The transition will create hundreds of thousands of jobs if it is done in a positive way. Once we get pundits to begin talking about the jobs that will be created from a climate change/energy bill, we will have won the messaging war. All in all a good speech, though it's not over until the leak has been stopped. In that respect, the speech was useless.

Do not touch gun issues. That is what the Democrats supposedly learned from the 1994 midterm elections. Bill Clinton supported the Brady Bill among other gun control acts and managed to alienate many of the southern Democrats who brought him a governing majority in 1992. So when President Obama and his huge majority were elected, they made a point to avoid any serious talk of pursuing further gun control measures. In fact, gun control has arguably suffered more setbacks under Obama than under the gun-friendly Bush Administration. First, a provision allowing firearms in state parks was attached to the Credit CARD bill. Next, came the amendment to a supplemental transportation funding bill which removed restrictions on firearms on Amtrak trains. Now, the House has attached an amendment excepting the National Rifle Association from its campaign finance bill. 

The ease at which Democrats have seemed to throw gun control out as a bargaining chip seems to be reminiscent of the Democrats of the New Deal Coalition. These Democrats did not pursue gun restrictions or any real divisive social issues. And this led to monumental successes on economic policy. However, avoiding the issue of gun control is one thing. It is another entirely to allow it to be reversed for a handful of conservative Democratic and Republican votes. So to all the frightened gun owners out there. Obama and the Democrats will not take away your guns. You can now stop buying all the ammo at Walmart for two consecutive years.

One central narrative Republican politicians have been using to oppose President Obama's agenda. When Scott Brown declared he thought the Administration should be focusing on health care rather than healthcare reform, he was repeating a common conservative talking point. That was then. Now, the Senate and House have passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, The Worker, Homeowner, and Business Assistance Act, and many other measures that would stimulate job creation. Then we saw the COMPETES Act go down in flames because of Republican amendments. Now President Obama is pushing for a $30 billion dollar small business loan fund and conservatives are outraged. 

How can accuse the Administration of not pursuing enough jobs legislation, criticize them for doing it, then complain about the deficit and call for tax cuts. There is so much nonsense in the GOP recovery narrative, it is sometimes difficult to get through to anything substantial. Scott Brown eventually did vote for the much weakened jobs bill, though only after he was called out by Harry Reid for breaking his word. It is so much easier to blame others for the failure of their policies, though it would be nice to have the GOP provide some suggestions as to what would work better. 

John Barrow (D-GA) is the latest lawmaker to suffer the consequences for opposing President Obama's signature domestic achievement. Only five lawmakers have contributed to his reelection campaign, down from 52 in 2006. A similar thing has been happening with Jim Matheson (D-UT), whose party is rallying behind a more liberal candidate leading up to the primary. The Democratic Party seems so proud of the passage of health care reform, it seems to have forgotten the conditions under which it passed. 

When health care reform passed, it did not have the favorability ratings it now has. It had around a net 10% disapproval rate. This would have been a tough vote for any politician to take. Furthermore, Jim Matheson and John Barrow were both considering a "yes" vote for health care on the eve of its passage. This means they would have voted for it, had the whip count showed a lack of votes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has a well know strategy of allowing vulnerable Democrats to vote against controversial bills once there are enough votes for passage. It is extremely likely she did exactly this.