Jon Henke's blog

A Harris Interactive poll from April 2007 reminds me a law of US politics: Americans like getting things, but we don't like paying for them. 

• A 71 percent to 15 percent majority of adults do not think "it is necessary to increase taxes to reduce the budget deficit". Large majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents feel this way;
• Even if taxes "had to be raised", very large majorities oppose raising the estate tax (64%) gas taxes (82%), income taxes (81%), the social security tax (83%), and the Medicare tax (87%);
• When it comes to cutting government spending, there is little support for cutting any substantial programs.

Unfortunately, our government does not have a price mechanism that would allow voters and politicians to do cost/benefit calculations in order to prioritize spending. An effectively progressive flat tax - indexed to spending and made flat across labor and capital income - would do a great deal to solve that problem.  But politicians - Republicans and Democrats - prefer red meat to reality.

A more recent Tax Foundation/Harris poll showed much the same thing, and even suggested people support some conservative/Republicans policy positions (tax reform, tax cuts).

Naturally, some Republicans always pick up on these things and use them to argue that Americans really do support Republican policies.  Well, no. 

Limited government and low taxes are not policies - they are ideals, goals.  Policies are how you achieve those goals, and Republicans have never really figured out how to address the the structural problems that created this philosophically conservative, operationally liberal electorate.

A renewal on the Right must address that problem, or we will be in for another period of power without progress.   In order to rebuild with some chance of progress, the Right's agenda must focus on policies with the following characteristics:

1. Good Policy: The policy works and will help us achieve our ideals.

2. Transformational: The policy will address the structural problems with government - public choice theory, perverse incentives, poor collective decision making systems and the lack of a price mechanism for government.

3. Popular: The policy enjoys majority support, and Republicans can win elections campaigning in support of the policy. (This excludes issues that might gain survey support, but do not actually create an electoral coalition)

4. Viable: The policy has a reasonable chance to be passed into law under a modest Republican majority.

5. Sustainable: Public support for the policy can be maintained.

So here's an open question for the Right: What Right-of-center policies are good policy, transformational, popular, viable and sustainable?

I can't leave this Lindsey Graham story alone.  It's not just that the free market, limited government, social tolerance voters (a swing vote that accounts for up to 20% of the electorate) deserves more respect from the Republican Party - it does - but that Lindsey Graham and many other Republicans don't seem to realize the position of weakness they are in.  Consider...

Lindsey Graham, while announcing that "We are not going to build a party around libertarian ideas", said...

“I’m a winner, pal,” Graham [said] ... “Winning matters to me. If it doesn’t matter to you, there’s the exit sign.” [...] “I’m not going to give this party over to people who can’t win,” Graham responded.

But the Republican Party is already controlled by people who can't win.

The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. [...] By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.

While it is important to be flexible enough to win elections in more States, the solution to the Republican Party problem is not "be more vague, so that you don't alienate people".

As for Lindsey Graham: It's hard to see any coherent vision from Sen. Graham beyond 'power and perks'.  Republicans need to find out exactly what it is Sen. Graham is trying to "win".  He may have won his own election, but that only makes him a leader in the downward spiral of the Republican Party.

In his inaugural address, President Obama said we should not worry about the size of government, but about whether we're spending money on things that work... 

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

And yet, in the few months since taking office, President Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up companies that were not working.  When, exactly, will the answer be "no"? 

Last week, I participated in the Winston Group's Right Idea, alongside Kristen Soltis and Jill Bandes.  The videos are below the fold.

In the radio and music industry, it's understood that people establish lifelong musical preferences in their teens and early 20's.  Nate Silver says this may also be true of political preferences.  Looking at new Gallup data on partisan identification by age, Silver tried mapping it against the question: "who was President when you turned 18?"

As it turns out, "the popularity -- or lack thereof -- of the President when the voter turned 18 would seem to have a lot of explanatory power for how their politics turned out later on".

In general, however, this points toward the idea that partisan identification -- while not exactly being "hard-wired" -- can be quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse. Voters who came of age during the eight years of the Bush Presidency are roughly eight points more Democratic than the rest of the country; that advantage could be worth an extra point or two to Democrats throughout the next half-century.

As Kristen Soltis has pointed out here recently, "young voters began abandoning the Republican Party long before Barack Obama was even a serious contender for the presidency. Those pinning the Republican Party's poor fortunes among young voters on the Obama candidacy miss the source of the problem and certainly underestimate its severity."

Lesson: Republicans had better become more appealing to young people, because patterns established in youth persist for life. 

The report that David Geffen is considering purchasing the New York Times and "convert[ing] it into a nonprofit institution" makes me wonder if the New York Times is suddenly regretting their editorial criticizing "rich benefactors [who] can spend on anything they want, and they tend to spend on projects close to their hearts."

I'm guessing a non-profit New York Times will have a remarkably fast change of heart on their support for capping deductions for charitable giving, and on their suggestion that "the government should demand a role in charities’ allocation of resources in exchange for the tax deduction. Or maybe the deduction should go altogether."

The second edition of the Washington Post's Grading Whitehouse.gov series is up.  The panel includes David Weinberger, Ellen Miller, Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, David Almacy and myself.  Our bottom line...

The group's average grade on first assessment in March was a C+, far from the mostly glowing early reviews of the Obama administration. As one of the graders summed up, Obama's WhiteHouse.gov "still has a long way to go to meet the expectations that the President himself set during the campaign."

In this second report card, the site's grades range from C to A-, with the average grade rising to a solid B.

More of our comments are contained in the story.  My own grade and response were based not on the technical and design aspects of the site (which, as far as I can tell, are excellent), but on their success in achieving the substantive transparency, accessibility and engagement goals.  I genuinely believe the people involved want to do that, though I also think it will be difficult for reasons mostly outside their control.  Still, though it probably won't get me invited to the White House Christmas Party, I think that is the standard against which Whitehouse.gov should be evaluated. Here is the response I gave Jose Antonio Vargas.

Grade: C

I'm going to judge Whitehouse.gov against what they can become.  They have made good progress - the design and features are solid, and their use of outside tools has been groundbreaking for government.

However, their accomplishments have been more technical than cultural. Bringing genuine transparency to Whitehouse.gov will be a monumental task.  The blog has made some real progress towards giving us some insight into what's happening in the White House.  The White House online Town Hall was an interesting experiment.  They deserve kudos for being willing to address crowdsourced questions.  It is a good first step towards more authentic public interaction with the White House.

On the other hand, it's been around 2 months since Presidential speech transcripts and appointments have been updated.  I'm pretty sure Obama has given a speech since February 27th, and he's made plenty of appointments since February 12th.  So why are the transcripts and appointments not updated the same day?

More importantly, as Cato's Jim Harper has pointed out, Whitehouse.gov seems to be breaking Obama's campaign promise not to sign any non-emergency legislation until we've been given an opportunity on the Whitehouse.gov website to read and comment on the bill for 5 days.  That suggests a troubling lack of commitment to transparency.

At TechPresident, Nancy Scola offers a good summary:

On the plus side, the Obama White House's web operation is moving into "advanced" level web work with gusto. In a little more than three months, they've expanded what's expected from a presidential administration to include interactivity like online town halls, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog posts from a range of administration officials.

But the White House is losing points for completeness. Getting lost in the process is a strong grasp of the basic ABCs of government web work. The daily tedium of press briefings and presidential remarks and details on planned events has often slipped through the cracks on WhiteHouse.gov. That record-keeping might not be sexy. It is, though, a box that a modern presidential administration needs to vigorously check first before moving on to far more fun and attention-grabbing online experimentation.

Armed Liberal has comments that those on the Right (and Republicans) need to read and understand.  I'll quote it at length, because it (particularly the bolded parts) is basically correct...and very important.  (Via Andrew Sullivan)

The GOP's problem is twofold. First, we just concluded a period of history in which the GOP ran everything. And they did it really badly. They were corrupt and incompetent. They led us into an unnecessary and costly war; they got themselves embroiled in an endless string of scandals; and they presided over an epic economic collapse. People remember all those things very vividly and it has badly damaged the Republican brand.

But that's only half of the GOP's problem. The reason the Republican Party continues to bleed members has much more to do with the general attitude of the party's political and intellectual leaders than anything else. Rather than admit to any mistakes or take even the slightest bit of responsibility for the state of the country, they insist on blaming everyone but themselves. [...] They watch TV and they see a very intelligent, charismatic President who says a lot of very reasonable sounding things and exudes competence. And then they see a bunch of angry conservatives and Republicans who insist that that same man is some sort of evil communist who's going to destroy the country. In other words, the problem is not the ideas, but the attitude. Republicans are coming across as a bunch of obnoxious, unreasonable a-holes. When you've just been voted out of power for manifest incompetence and your opponents are led by a very popular and reasonable-sounding person, you don't have the luxury of acting smug and uncompromising all the time. You have to acknowledge error and show some humility. You have to act civilly. You have to at least try to appear pragmatic and reasonable. But the GOP is not interested in doing any of these things. Those who are left in the party are ultra-partisan and utterly convinced of their own infallibility and moral righteousness. Until they lose that attitude and general combativeness, it won't matter what their ideas are. They'll just keep turning people off.

I keep making this point, and I'm not seeing much evidence that Republicans are really taking this seriously: The first priority for the Right cannot be defeating the Democrats.  The first priority for the Right must be reforming the Republican Party. 

That requires some very serious, substantive contrition for the mistakes they've made. 

• It requires Republican politicians to unilaterally embrace reforms within the GOP, without regard to how Democrats behave. 
• It requires Republicans to plant a flag on ethics, transparency, honesty and tone - to define higher standards and consequences, and to call out other Republicans who do not live up to appropriate standards.
• It requires the Right to do some serious re-evaluation of the entrenched movement, infrastructure and interest groups we have accumulated.  The leaders of the movement have to accept some responsibility for the condition we are in.

The Republican brand does not merely need a little tinkering.  The Republican brand is not the victim of Democratic rhetoric and framing.  The Republican brand is so bad because people accurately perceive the state of the Republican Party.  

Rhetorical contrition and promises are insufficient.  Fixing that problem requires actual, painful, reform.

Kudos to Senator DeMint (and his bipartisan co-signers) for getting the Senate to begin publishing votes in the more accessible XML format.  A simple thing to do, sure, and yet it really did take pressure from US Senators to make it happen.

As John Wonderlich writes, "This is what transparency reform looks like. Complicated, messy, confusing, often bipartisan, often initially unsuccessful, and helpfully spurred on through public involvement. If this case serves as any example at all, we should be very encouraged about future efforts."

"[C]onstraints become much less effective, and may well be evaded, if the motive force behind governmental action is 'do-goodism.' The licentious sinners we can control; the saintly ascetics may destroy us." - Geoffrey Brennan & James M. Buchanan

The Obama administration's unilateral, ad hoc rewriting of bankruptcy process is disturbing, as a matter of both finance and rule of law.  As Megan McArdle writes...

[W]hen did it become the government's job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line?  Leave aside the moral point that these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group.

Nor is it reasonable for Obama to complain that creditors "were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none".  In fact, those creditors were offering to take a 60% loss on their investment (even less than they would get in bankruptcy). 

"You guys suck" is not actually a part of US law.

More from Megan McArdle, Tom Maguire and Ed Morrissey.  I'm reminded of another quote...

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - Darth Vader