The Wisdom of Bob Dole

Bob Dole no longer recognizes the Republican Party that he helped lead for years. Speaking over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday,” he said his party should hang a “closed for repairs” sign on its doors until it comes up with a few positive ideas, because neither he nor Ronald Reagan would now feel comfortable in its membership.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

“It seems to be almost unreal that we can’t get together on a budget or legislation,” said Mr. Dole, the former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate. “I mean, we weren’t perfect by a long shot, but at least we got our work done.”

The current Congress can’t even do that, thanks to a furiously oppositional Republican Party, and that’s what has left mainstream conservatives like Mr. Dole and Senator John McCain shaking their heads in disgust.

The difference between the current crop of Tea Party lawmakers and Mr. Dole’s generation is not simply one of ideology. While the Tea Partiers are undoubtedly more extreme, Mr. Dole spent years pushing big tax cuts, railing at regulations and blocking international treaties. His party actively courted the religious right in the 1980s and relied on racial innuendo to win elections. But when the time came to actually govern, Republicans used to set aside their grandstanding, recognize that a two-party system requires compromise and make deals to keep the government working on the people’s behalf.

The current generation refuses to do that. Its members want to dismantle government, using whatever crowbar happens to be handy, and they don’t particularly care what traditions of mutual respect get smashed at the same time. “I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told The Times last week.

This corrosive mentality has been standard procedure in the House since 2011, but now it has seeped over to the Senate. Mr. Rubio is one of several senators who have blocked a basic function of government: a conference committee to work out budget differences between the House and Senate so that Congress can start passing appropriations bills. They say they are afraid the committee will agree to raise the debt ceiling without extorting the spending cuts they seek. One of them, Ted Cruz of Texas, admitted that he didn’t even trust House Republicans to practice blackmail properly. They have been backed by Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who wants extremist credentials for his re-election.

At long last, this is finally drawing the rancor of Mr. Dole’s heirs in the responsible wing of the party. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said that negotiating on a budget was an “issue of integrity.” Roy Blunt, Lamar Alexander and many others have encouraged talks, and Mr. McCain (who was not above veering to the far right when he was running for president in 2008) now says the Tea Partiers are “absolutely out of line” and setting a bad precedent.

“We’re here to vote, not here to block things,” he said last week. “We’re here to articulate our positions on the issues and do what we can for the good of the country and the let the process move forward.”

Already, the mulish behavior of Congressional Republicans has led to the creation of the sequester, blocked action on economic growth and climate change, prevented reasonable checks on gun purchases and threatens to blow up a hard-fought compromise on immigration. Mr. Dole’s words should remind his party that it is not only abandoning its past, but damaging the country’s future.

View the original article here

In Health Ruling, Relief for Obama but a Blow to Conventional Wisdom

The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision on Thursday to uphold most of President Obama’s health care law represents a hurdle cleared for Mr. Obama. He had been at risk of seeing his most ambitious policy initiative — and most expensive, in terms of the political capital it required — neutered or
overturned by the court.

If Mr. Obama is the victor from the standpoint of public policy, however, some observers have claimed that the decision could help Mitt Romney in terms of electoral politics.

With due respect, I think this counterintuitive conclusion is too cute by half. It may involve the same sort of wishful thinking that liberals were guilty of when some began to argue that the court striking the health care bill would actually help Mr. Obama politically.

Other analyses issued before the decision had implausibly argued that both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama could benefit from the law being upheld. They seem to forget that in contrast to public policy, electoral politics is largely a zero-sum game.

The health care law is likely to remain fairly unpopular; opinions about it have been essentially unchanged for most of the last two years. The bill was probably partially responsible for the significant losses that Democrats endured in the 2010 midterm elections.

But continued dissatisfaction over the health care bill was presumably already priced into the polls. A decision that upholds the status quo is not likely to change that much.

To the extent there are marginal effects of the court’s decision, they would seem to be positive for Mr. Obama. The framework of the bill has now been endorsed by the court, including by John G. Roberts Jr., the relatively conservative and relatively well-respected Chief Justice who wrote the majority opinion.

To be clear, the risks to Mr. Obama may have been somewhat asymmetric. A decision to strike the law might have harmed him more than the decision to uphold it will help.

And be wary of whatever the polls say for the next week or two — the short-term reaction to the news of the ruling may not match its long-term political effects. As before, the presidential election is mostly likely to be contested mainly on economic grounds. Next week’s jobs report is likely to have a larger effect on the election than what the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

But particularly given the public’s confusion over the health care law, my view has been to keep it simple: Mr. Obama got the good headline here, and that is likely to be most of what the public reacts to.

It is not as though, if the law had been struck down, Republicans would have stopped talking about the folly of the legislation. Members of the public, in mostly opposing the law, had not been objecting to its technical details, some of which they actually supported when quizzed about the specific aspects of the health care overhaul.

Instead, it was to the impression that it represented an overreach on behalf of Mr. Obama — at a time when there is profound skepticism about the direction of government and the efficacy of its policy — that left him vulnerable.

When the dust settles, it seems implausible that Mr. Obama would have been better off politically had his signature reform been nullified by the court. Then Mr. Obama’s perceived overreach would have had the stench of being unconstitutional.

Some of the analyses that claim the law could help Mr. Romney instead argue that Thursday’s decision could motivate the Republican base. But the Republican base was already reasonably well motivated for the election. A decision to strike down the law, meanwhile, would have represented a victory for movement conservatism — and victory can be its own motivating force.

Although some liberals had claimed that a decision to strike the law could have motivated Democratic turnout in anger against the Supreme Court’s decision, it can likewise be argued that it would have left Democrats despondent, particularly given that any efforts to replace an overturned law would have faced huge political obstacles in the near term. The effects on the party bases are hard to sort out.

It is what passes for conventional wisdom that may have been the clearest loser with the court’s decision. Sentiment in prediction markets and among pundits had been that the law was more likely than not to be overturned.

As I wrote on Wednesday, some of these analysis may have gotten ahead of themselves in trying to read the tea leaves.

Statistical methods to predict the court’s decision, which have been more reliable than expert judgment in the past, had pointed to a case that was too close to call.

In another blow to conventional wisdom, the decision to uphold the law came in a 5-to-4 vote, but with Chief Justice Roberts voting with the four liberals on the court while Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted with the conservatives — and he signed a strongly worded dissenting opinion that claimed the entire law should have been struck down.

This permutation had been considered unlikely by experts, most of whom had predicted a 6-to-3 ruling for the law, or a 5-to-4 ruling against it, with Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy voting together in either case. And if the decision had been 5 to 4 in favor of the law, it was thought that Justice Kennedy and not Chief Justice Roberts would have been more likely to join the majority.

Who came out looking better than the pundits? Interestingly, it may be high school students.

High school students participating in a Supreme Court “fantasy league” sponsored by the nonprofit Harlan Institute had been about evenly divided in predicting the court’s decision, with 57 percent thinking the mandate would be overturned and 43 percent saying it would be upheld.

Nor did the oral arguments in the case, which substantially affected the conventional wisdom, alter the students’ opinions much. Instead, they had seen the case as a tossup from the beginning.

I suspect these students would have been wise enough to avoid some of the counterintuitive speculation about the decision’s political effects that you will now be seeing on television.

View the original article here

Studies challenge wisdom of GOP candidates' plans (AP)

WASHINGTON – Key proposals from the Republican presidential candidates might make for good campaign fodder. But independent analyses raise serious questions about those plans and their ability to cure the nation's ills in two vital areas, the economy and housing.

Consider proposed cuts in taxes and regulation, which nearly every GOP candidate is pushing in the name of creating jobs. The initiatives seem to ignore surveys in which employers cite far bigger impediments to increased hiring, chiefly slack consumer demand.

"Republicans favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but these had no stimulative effect during the George W. Bush administration, and there is no reason to believe that more of them will have any today," writes Bruce Bartlett. He's an economist who worked for Republican congressmen and in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

As for the idea that cutting regulations will lead to significant job growth, Bartlett said in an interview, "It's just nonsense. It's just made up."

Government and industry studies support his view.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks companies' reasons for large layoffs, found that 1,119 layoffs were attributed to government regulations in the first half of this year, while 144,746 were attributed to poor "business demand."

Mainstream economic theory says governments can spur demand, at least somewhat, through stimulus spending. The Republican candidates, however, have labeled President Barack Obama's 2009 stimulus efforts a failure. Instead, most are calling for tax cuts that would primarily benefit high-income people, who are seen as the likeliest job creators.

"I don't care about that," Texas Gov. Rick Perry told The New York Times and CNBC, referring to tax breaks for the rich. "What I care about is them having the dollars to invest in their companies."

Many existing businesses, however, have plenty of unspent cash. The 500 companies that comprise the S&P index have about $800 billion in cash and cash equivalents, the most ever, according to the research firm Birinyi Associates.

The rating firm Moody's says the roughly 1,600 companies it monitors had $1.2 trillion in cash at the end of 2010. That's 11 percent more than a year earlier.

Small businesses rate "poor sales" as their biggest problem, with government regulations ranking second, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Of the small businesses saying this is not a good time to expand, half cited the poor economy as the chief reason. Thirteen percent named the "political climate."

More small businesses complained about regulation during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, according to an analysis of the federation's data by the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Such findings notwithstanding, further cuts in taxes and regulations remain popular with GOP voters. A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that most Democrats and about half of independents think "reducing environmental and other regulations on business" would do little or nothing to create jobs. But only one-third of Republicans felt that way.

The GOP's presidential hopefuls are shaping their economic agendas along those lines.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says his 59-point plan "seeks to reduce taxes, spending, regulation and government programs."

Businessman Herman Cain would significantly cut taxes for the wealthy with his 9 percent flat tax plan. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said in a recent debate, "It's the regulatory burden that costs us $1.8 trillion every year. ... It's jobs that are lost."

The candidates have said little about another national problem: depressed home prices, as well as the high numbers of foreclosures and borrowers who owe more than their houses are worth.

After the Oct. 18 GOP debate in Las Vegas, a center of foreclosure activity, editors of the AOL Real Estate site wrote, "We didn't hear any meaningful solutions to the housing crisis. That's no surprise, considering that housing has so far been a ghost issue in the campaign."

To the degree the candidates addressed housing, they mainly took a hands-off approach. "We need to get government out of the way," Cain said. "It starts with making sure that we can boost this economy and then reform Dodd-Frank," which is a law that regulates Wall Street transactions.

Bachmann, in an answer that mentioned "moms" six times, said foreclosures fall most heavily on women who are "losing their nest for their children and for their family." She said Obama "has failed you on this issue of housing and foreclosures. I will not fail you on this issue." Bachmann offered no specific remedies.

Romney told editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal: "Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom. Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

Perry spokesman Mark Miner said the Texas governor's "immediate remedy for housing is to get America working again. ... Creating jobs will address the housing concerns that are impacting communities throughout America."

Bartlett, whose books on tax policy include "The Benefit and the Burden," recently wrote in the New York Times: "People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them."

The candidates and their supporters dispute this, of course. A series of scheduled debates may give them chances to explain why their proposals would hit the right targets.

View the original article here