The New Guard

Obama’s Second Term: Time for More Ambitious Foreign Policy

Nov 8, 2012Brad Bosserman

The first term was spent playing defense. Now it's time to get on the offensive with an ambitious foreign policy agenda.

Tuesday night’s election results were a powerful endorsement of President Obama’s leadership. Though exit polls seem to indicate that foreign affairs played only a minor role in the decisions of most voters, the president has a remarkable opportunity to reassert American leadership in his second term by outlining and executing an ambitious global agenda.

The first term was spent playing defense. Now it's time to get on the offensive with an ambitious foreign policy agenda.

Tuesday night’s election results were a powerful endorsement of President Obama’s leadership. Though exit polls seem to indicate that foreign affairs played only a minor role in the decisions of most voters, the president has a remarkable opportunity to reassert American leadership in his second term by outlining and executing an ambitious global agenda.

The last four years have been characterized by a largely safe and conservative foreign policy that was focused on cleaning up two wars that his administration inherited and addressing a global terrorism threat in need of containment. For the most part, the president has done an admirable job on both fronts and has exercised deft, competent, and thoughtful leadership across a range of foreign policy decisions. However, when given opportunities to make big, ambitious plays, he has consistently chosen to play it safe. The response to the Arab Awakenings could be much more powerful, with policy leadership and a political push equal to the historic opportunities in the region. The European monetary union remains in perpetual near-crisis, but the president has elected to play a supporting role. The U.S. trade agenda, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has made slow and steady progress, but has remained largely absent from the president’s broad narrative of promoting American values and strategic vision.

In order to accomplish this, the administration will need to fully come to terms with the “rise of the rest” and ascension of middle-income countries on the world’s stage. Strong American leadership in this new world will require reimagining the architecture of global governance. Some of this is underway with the increased reliance on the G20 rather than the G8. But more will have to be done to incorporate other nations substantively into the fabric of the IMF, World Bank, and Security Council. Additionally, we will need to craft new institutions that can coordinate collective action and truly make the United States an indispensable super partner in addition to being a super power. The U.S. is well positioned to lead this movement, but it must choose to seize that mantel and responsibility.

In President Obama’s second term, he should also double down on expanding the benefits of trade, openness, and economic growth in the developing world. There is perhaps nothing that can do more to solidify and secure long-term U.S. interests abroad than to help usher in a new world of opportunities for everyday people living in volatile and tumultuous regions. Families in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East want what everyone wants: decent jobs, safe communities, educational opportunities, and a real path for their children to realize their full potential. Simon Rosenberg has observed, “FDR and his fellow progressives took on the challenges of their day and built the domestic programs and international institutions that ushered in an era of unrivaled prosperity and stability.” The challenge facing today’s progressives is no less important.

This administration has talked up many foreign policy accomplishments over the last four years, but the president has a real opportunity over the next four to leave a lasting legacy by reasserting a 21st century liberal internationalism. With the partisan congressional dynamics largely unchanged after the election, it is certainly possible that gridlock over domestic policy will create incentives for the president to focus more attention on a more ambitious foreign policy. I hope that he does.

Bradley Bosserman is a member of the DC chapter of the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline and a Foreign Policy Analyst at NDN and the New Policy Institute, where he directs the Middle East and North Africa Initiative.

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A New Era in Health Care Begins

Nov 7, 2012Richard Kirsch

Despite the bill's flaws, its passage -- and Obama's reelection -- ensure a whole new ball game.

Despite the bill's flaws, its passage -- and Obama's reelection -- ensure a whole new ball game.

Four years ago, my wife and I planted an oak tree on Election Day – our Obama Oak – at the front of our house. The remarkable thing about the tree is how long it holds on to its leaves. I see it from my window, now doubled in height, still holding its crimson leaves, even after Sandy’s winds blew the leaves off of every other tree in the surrounding Taconic Hills. For me, the Obama Oak’s hardiness is a testament to perseverance of a health reform movement and a president, who together completed the 100-year quest to make health care a government-guaranteed right in the United States. With the president’s reelection, that quest is now secure and a new era in American health care begins.

I am sure that skeptics on the left will scoff at the assertion that the ACA launches a new era in health care. After all, a key to securing congressional passage of the Affordable Care Act was that the law did not upend the current system of health care financing in the United States. The ACA maintains and expands the current three pillars of health coverage: coverage at work, coverage from the government, and coverage purchased by individuals. But unlike those skeptics, the opponents of ObamaCare understand that once the government is responsible for arranging affordable health coverage for its citizens, it is a whole new ball game.

There are two ways to get a glimpse of the new world, one by looking at Medicare and Social Security, the other by seeing what’s happening under RomneyCare in Massachusetts.

Congress has debated changes in Social Security and Medicare almost every year since each program was enacted. Throughout that time, conservatives have tried to stop the programs from expanding and pushed to privatize these public gems. They continue to do so today at their continued political peril. But the history of the programs is that each slowly expands to cover more people with more benefits, as Americans increasingly rely on them for their financial security.

Since its passage in 1935, Social Security’s initial meager payments, available to only a limited set of workers, were expanded over time to provide decent (though far from generous) benefits to almost all workers and extended to surviving spouses and dependent children. Medicare also continued to expand the services i covered, including adding prescription drug coverage a decade ago and just last month improving coverage for some chronically ill beneficiaries. Medicaid has also become a very popular part of the social insurance structure, relied upon by low-income families, the disabled, and an increasing number of the aged.

In writing this, I don’t mean to gloss over the flaws and even setbacks in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Each of the programs could be improved. But the vital point is that debates over the programs happen largely in public. Health and retirement security for seniors is not a matter just of market forces or private arrangements; it makes up a substantial amount of federal spending and policy. And politicians have found that Social Security and Medicare are the third rails of American politics.

The same will be true for the Affordable Care Act once its key provisions to expand coverage to tens of millions of people start in 2014. At that point, the mystery that is ObamaCare will begin to be cleared up, as millions of people – touching many more millions of family members – find that they have access to affordable health coverage, either from the government or purchased with government subsidies. People will learn first-hand that if they lose their job, start a small business, or retire early, they will still be able to be insured. All the fear-mongering will lose its bite when instead of the sky falling, people have a new floor of health security.

Congressional fights over the ACA will become an annual staple of American politics. The right will continue to try to gut many of its main provisions. Progressives will work to make the law more affordable, building on the popular support that will be established and pushing for improvements. The health care industry will fight over how it impacts their bottom line. There will be big public debates on how the ACA controls health care spending and how much the government can afford to spend. Through all this, as more people are covered by the ACA, ObamaCare will join Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as integral parts of how Americans attain a basic level of financial security and personal well-being.

We can already see some of this in Massachusetts. RomneyCare is very popular, a settled part of the political landscape. It is working well: Romney even bragged that 98 percent of Massachusetts residents were covered in the third presidential debate. Health costs have gone up less quickly than neighboring states, and more employers are providing coverage.

But because the state is now responsible for more of the cost of health coverage, the Massachusetts legislature, often at the urging of Governor Deval Patrick, has vigorous debates every year on how to better rein in the growth of health spending. This year it passed a law intended to set limits on the rise in health spending. Under pressure from the new law, health insurance companies and hospital systems are agreeing to new cost control measures. The people who run the subsidized marketplace for private insurance have used their market clout to get insurers to improve quality while controlling costs. And in liberal Massachusetts – I won’t predict this for Congress – there has been no serious consideration of cutting benefits or subsidies to people.

With President Obama’s reelection and the Democratic majority under Harry Reid in the Senate, there is no doubt that the Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented in 2014. States in which Republican governors and legislatures have delayed taking action will need to decide by November 16th whether to run the new individual and small business marketplaces (the “exchanges”) or hand that authority to the federal government. States and the federal government will start moving aggressively to meet the deadline to begin enrollment next October. A huge new expansion of Medicaid will be agreed to in all but a handful of states. There will be new regulations, furious maneuvering in the health care industry, continued political posturing. And a new era in health care, an era in which the right to health care is a public matter, a matter of regular, government policy, will finally have begun in the United States.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

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Roosevelt Reacts: What Does Last Night Mean and Where Do We Go From Here?

Nov 7, 2012

President Obama won a second term. How did he get there? And what should he do now? Roosevelt weighs in.

Thomas Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, and Contributing Editor, AlterNet:

President Obama won a second term. How did he get there? And what should he do now? Roosevelt weighs in.

Thomas Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, and Contributing Editor, AlterNet:

Now that it’s over, it’s time to take stock. All counts are incomplete, but something like 116 million votes were cast. The presidential election alone cost about $2.6 billion, or a bit more than $22 dollars per vote. But that money wasn’t spread evenly over America; in battleground states like Ohio, the sums per voter were much larger. Now look at the exit polls in today’s New York Times. Yes, indeed, Obama did very well among women, Latinos, and African-Americans. But in sharp contrast to 2008, the partisan split along income lines is huge. Obama’s vote percentage declines in straight line fashion as income rises. He got 63 percent of the votes of Americans making less than $30,000 and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000. Above $50,000, the Other America kicks in. Romney won 53 percent of the votes of Americans making between $50 and $100,000 and 54 percent of the votes of Americans making above $100,000. The Democrats’ poor showing in the House elections – they way under-performed for a party that had lost so many seats two years before – probably reflects a Republican advantage in money, including the famous Super PACs, some of which poured resources into congressional races. It was surely also affected by the White House’s reluctance to spend time and resources trying  to elect Democratic House candidates. As the president negotiates for a Grand Bargain in the face of the fiscal cliff, these are realities that are worth remembering

Jonathan Silverstone, Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network member and sophomore at Yale University:

In the months leading up to yesterday's reelection of President Barack Obama, both candidates said very little about a critical issue in the ongoing economic recovery: housing. Yet President Obama’s reelection can certainly provide affordable housing advocates hope in the face of some of the things Governor Mitt Romney had to say on the campaign trail. Eliminating the Department of Housing and Urban Development and scaling back key grant programs were just two of the possible policies a Romney administration may have enacted had he won the presidency. While this general direction for the federal government has been avoided, there is a larger issue at hand.

A report by the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness demonstrates just how urgently we need a policy solution to the fundamental lack of affordable housing. It points to HUD figures that show a growing gap between low-income housing demand and current low-income housing stock during a time of increasing rates of homelessness in America. This gap reached 5.5 million units in 2009. The Obama administration must act to ensure demand for affordable housing is met and to assist low-income households in being able to afford this housing.

More immediately, the broad budget cuts constituting January’s scheduled sequestration present the president with a much more pressing housing issue. If Washington does not devise a budget compromise, multiple key housing programs that help fund public housing operations and provide rental assistance to low-income families stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. As America looks toward another four years of President Obama, and hopefully toward revamped policy that combines with market incentives to meet affordable housing demand, the lame duck Congress must work with the administration immediately to make sure crucial housing programs remain untouched before we hit the fiscal cliff in January. 

Tarsi Dunlop, member of the Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline in DC:

Now that the election results are in (well most of them are), we can start looking forward to the next four years. It is difficult to figure out where to start, but the first issue will be the rapidly approaching "fiscal cliff." We cannot bask in the glow of the election for long; we must protect the middle class from devastating cuts to essential programs and services. Beyond that, we must advocate for a federal budget that deals with our deficit in a responsible manner over the long-term; we are slowly recovering from the Great Recession, but progress is fragile and many American families are still suffering from unemployment (or underemployment). We cannot afford cuts that will undermine our gradual economic growth, growth that is by some estimates expected to produce 12 million more jobs over the next four years. Building, or in this case re-building an economy, takes time and we won’t turn back now.

This fall, President Obama asked the nation to give him four more years, to continue the work we started in 2008. Other issues that should be on the progressive agenda include protecting and expanding the social safety net for future generations, pursuing policies to reduce our impact on the environment in hopes of addressing the ever-growing threat of climate change (an issue rarely mentioned on the campaign trail), and advocating for responsible policies that will help our nation’s schools provide a quality education for each child. Our efforts to invest in the middle class continue and as we implement the Affordable Care Act, we know we won’t need to defend it against potential attacks from a Romney administration. By 2014, more Americans will feel the benefits of the president’s signature domestic achievement.

President Obama, and the progressive community as a whole, will find powerful allies in the United States Senate come January with Tammy Baldwin’s election as the first openly gay U.S. Senator and Elizabeth Warren’s win in Massachusetts. Indeed, the Bay State has sent another liberal lion to the Senate floor to advocate for policies that help working and middle-class families. These voices will defend a woman’s right to choose and make decisions about her own body. As progressives, we believe in inclusivity and justice for those of all backgrounds, and they will stand for those with no lobby. They will challenge the influence of oil companies and large corporations.  They will push the discussions we should have when it comes to governing and the role of government. It is time to continue that discussion.

However ambitious we are, we must recognize that the work will go on long after President Obama leaves office. The young people who once again broke sharply for the incumbent understand this reality and are rising to the challenge. Although Millennials are faced with dim job prospects, less security in their retirement, and in many cases, high levels of student debt, they are community oriented and civically engaged. They care about the vulnerable children as child hunger rates remain stubbornly high; they care about the dignity and security of our seniors and the mental and physical health of our veterans. They care about our infrastructure and want to see us investing in our nation’s roads, water pipes and public transportation. In 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama said “Yes We Can,” he meant we, the people. As one man, he (and U.S. presidents before and those to come) cannot create change. We must work toward that change, over the next four years and the next four decades in our communities and local governments. The question we are asking now, one that we should also ask of ourselves, is: what’s next?

Melia Ungson, Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network Northeast regional coordinator and student at Yale University:

Last night, I breathed a sigh of relief instead of jumping for joy (though, admittedly, there were shouts of excitement). Watching results from other races and ballot initiatives come in, I was similarly relieved to see voters in so many places support candidates and ballot measures to protect equal rights, which will hopefully elevate the discourse.  

Even though I go to school in Connecticut, which had a close senate race, I vote in California, largely because of the propositions, which are often close. In a state known recently for its budget issues and gridlock in the state legislature, the propositions serve as an alternate route for voters to address issues directly. Last night, California voters narrowly approved Prop 30 to help fund education and approved Prop 36 to reform the three strikes law, both exciting victories. However, voters failed to approve Prop 34 to repeal the costly and archaic death penalty and Prop 37, which would require the labeling of genetically engineered foods. California prides itself on being a forward-thinking state at the forefront of technology, environmental policy, and social equality, but voters do not always reflect this with propositions.

With all these election results, good, bad, mixed, or still to be decided, the pressure is on to start getting things done. I was excited that Obama alluded to issues like climate change and LGBT rights in his speech last night, and am hopeful that he and other re-elected or newly elected representatives will make progress on these and other issues come January. Our job as Millennialis is to continue to drive meaningful discourse, continue to put forth our own ideas on how best to work toward a stronger future, and ensure that issues important to young people don't fall by the wayside. 

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Rortybomb

Three Election Thoughts: The Failed All-In Repeal Strategy, Warren, and Three-Strikes

Nov 7, 2012Mike Konczal

The Consequences of the Conservative All-In Repeal Strategy: The attacks on Nate Silver have been fun to watch, but David Frum took the most heat for calling how this would all play out back in 2010. I really hope his Waterloo post, which made the case, will be on the radar of academics studying this era decades from now. Frum:

The Consequences of the Conservative All-In Repeal Strategy: The attacks on Nate Silver have been fun to watch, but David Frum took the most heat for calling how this would all play out back in 2010. I really hope his Waterloo post, which made the case, will be on the radar of academics studying this era decades from now. Frum:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster...Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now...No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

What's interesting to me is how the conservative movement followed an "all-in repeal" strategy since summer 2010. The think tanks didn't prioritize the parts of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank that they wanted to see removed and replaced with something else, and political agents didn't try to force changes in exchange for concessions on other priorities.

It was almost as if they didn't accept that the laws were the actual laws of the land. The major conservative think tanks all focused on either the unconstitutionality of the bills, hoping the Supreme Court would save them (this goes for Dodd-Frank as well), or wrote only in terms of repeal. During the primaries, every Republican presidential candidate promised to repeal Dodd-Frank and repeal Obamacare, and almost nobody said anything about what would go in their places. Romney famously was vague about how he'd replace Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. As such, there's been no signaling or mobilization on priorities for how conservatives should try to change these laws.

Part of this is a function of how the movement has been mobilizing itself. If Obamacare is an Ayn Rand horror story of socialists nationalizing the health-care industry, well, 10 percent less socialist horror is still a nightmare. If Eric Cantor went and, say, offered Obama a debt ceiling raise or a second stimulus in exchange for putting the CFPB's budget under Congress's control or pulling back parts of Obamacare, he'd likely have his head ripped off by the base. This also might be because the conservative movement is out of ideas, something that has become painfully obvious in its responses to the Great Recession.

But either way, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank will be here for a generation now.

More Reasons to Celebrate Elizabeth Warren: Besides all the other reasons to be happy about Elizabeth Warren winning her Senate seat, there are two additional policy reasons to consider. Conservatives and lobbyists are focused on removing the CFPB's funding, single directorship, and sole focus on consumer financial protection. Republicans have explicitly stated that they'll block any director until these changes are made. Warren, who came up with the idea for the agency and fought for its creation, will understand how important the mission and the legal structure for how the agency is funded and organized are, and fight for that as well.

Another important financial reform issue is that people are still nervous about how resolution authority, or the FDIC forcing a major financial firm to fail, will work in practice. Warren is one of the major experts on bankruptcy law -- she's the third most cited scholar on bankruptcy law in the country -- and also would like to see Too Big To Fail ended, so I believe she can work productively with FDIC to implement a resolution regime best capable of handling the problem.

California Overwhlemingly Votes to Ease Three-Strikes Law, Other States Legalize Marijuana: 18 years after it was first passed, California looks to ease its three-strike law by a 20-point margin. When people study how the United States differs from the rest of the world in terms of incarceration policy and how we manage to have a significantly higher prison population than other countries, mandatory penalties for those who have a prior (recidivists) is a major driver.

As the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Center for Law and Global Justice wrote in their report, “Cruel and Unusual: U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context,” all of the major policy differences between the United States and other countries -- "life without the possibility of parole, 'three strikes' laws, consecutive sentences, mandatory minimums, juvenile justice laws, dual sovereignty, and non-retroactive application of ameliorative law" -- are all anti-rehabilitation policies.

Let's go to the section of that report on three-strikes laws:

The most infamous example of a stringent habitual offender law is California’s three strikes law, which provides a sentence of 25 years to life for anyone convicted of a felony who has committed two prior serious or violent offenses. While the public pushes for “the worst of the worst” to be taken off the streets, the reality is that most third strike convictions are for non-violent felonies: fifty-four percent of third strike commitments under California’s three strikes law were for drug, property, and other non-violent crimes...

Virtually all of the countries surveyed for this report provided some type of increased penalty for recidivists. What distinguishes the United States from the rest of the world, however, is the lack of judicial discretion in sentencing schemes aimed at recidivists and the length of sentences that result...This leaves only 21% of countries, including the United States, that require a mandatory increased punishment for an offender with prior convictions.

For fun, what are those other countries that also have three-strike like laws?

Not the best company. Remember, these laws were designed to limit the power of judges and increase the power of prosecutors, a core part of the conservative assault on liberalism in the space of incarceration policy. This is a major change, likely to impact many other states for the better.

Meanwhile, Colorado and Washington voted to legalized and regulate marijuana use. As of right now, Attorney General Eric Holder has not publicly stated if the Feds will try to interfere with these new laws, like they threatened to do to California's proposal (which failed to pass). President Obama and Holder have a real opportunity to let states experiment with ending the failed War on Drugs as we know it, or an opportunity to keep a moral crime going indefinitely by federal preemption. Nicole Flatow has an excellent overview of the legal issues at Think Progress.

 

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The American People are Ready for Leadership in the Wake of Obama's Victory

Nov 7, 2012David Woolner

The election results could encourage the bipartisan cooperation we need to solve our country's greatest challenges.

The election results could encourage the bipartisan cooperation we need to solve our country's greatest challenges.

Today we re-consecrate our country to long-cherished ideals in a suddenly changed civilization. In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937

Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.—Barack Obama, 2012

With the 2012 election now over and President Obama returning to the White House, many Americans are asking themselves, will the next four years be any different? Or will we see more of the same gridlock, bickering, and obstructionism that so dominated the Washington political landscape of the past few years? Much will depend, of course, on the temper of the Congress, where the Republicans still hold a majority in the House of Representatives and where, despite their minority status in the Senate, Republicans can still use the filibuster to block or delay the president’s—and the country’s—agenda.

It was roughly two years ago that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell famously remarked that “the single most important thing” the Republican Party wanted to achieve “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” But now that the Republicans have failed in this effort one would hope that the party leadership would be more willing to work with—rather than against—the president and his Democratic colleagues.

Certainly the American public would welcome such a move, and thanks to the recent behavior of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, we now have a precedent upon which such a bi-partisan spirit might be built. For most Americans, Republican Governor Christie’s willingness to “extend the hand of friendship” to the President and “to say ‘thank you sir,’ for providing good leadership in a crisis and for helping the people of New Jersey” was a long overdue antidote to the harsh negativity of today’s “political discourse.”

Moreover, the same might be said for Governor Cuomo, who, despite his status as New York’s governor and leading Democrat, took the highly unusual step of endorsing Republican State Senator Stephen Saland’s bid for re-election thanks to the latter’s decision to support the governor’s legislation legalizing same-sex marriage last year. Senator Saland’s decision to vote in favor of the bill, in what he said was a personal vote of conscience, was not popular among his party’s right wing. So the governor, in a move he said was motivated in part by his desire to counter “extremists on both sides of the aisle,” came out strongly in favor of Saland, much to the chagrin of the senator’s Democratic opponent. (The winner in that race has yet to be called at this time.)

Like Governor’s Christie’s willingness to work with President Obama to meet the crisis caused by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Cuomo’s willingness to work with Republican legislators in Albany has been enormously popular among the New York electorate, where he has consistently enjoyed an approval rating of roughly 70 percent. Given all of this, and given the extremely low regard most Americans hold for Congress, one would hope that these examples of bi-partisan cooperation might prove infectious and that our representatives in Congress might summon the courage to work together to meet the enormous challenges we face today.

Nearly 80 years ago, at a time when our nation faced an even graver economic crisis, Franklin Roosevelt reminded those who were concerned “with the problems of government and economics” to never forget that “devotion to the public good, unselfish service, never-ending consideration of human needs are in themselves conquering forces.”

We expect this sort of devotion in the face of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, but is it too much to expect the same “consideration of human needs” in the face of the economic disaster we are grappling with today? If government can and must play a major role in rebuilding areas ravaged by nature’s fury why shouldn’t the same government do more to help those American citizens ravaged by the scourge of unemployment?

Last night in his acceptance speech, President Obama echoed Roosevelt’s first inaugural when he noted that the American people “voted for action, not politics as usual.” While the Speaker of the Republican-controlled House, John Boehner, remarked that the election represented “a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs.”

After years of partisan gridlock, the American people are hungry for that elusive but all-important quality they expect from their elected officials and which was on rare display for a brief moment as a president and a governor from different parties came together in a moment of compassion for those suffering hardship through no fault of their own. That quality is called leadership. Let us hope that the moment has finally arrived when those we have placed in positions of power, both in the White House and in Congress, will now have the courage to exercise it.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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The New Red Scare: Four Misconceptions About China on the Campaign Trail

Nov 6, 2012Leslie Bull

As the presidential race arrives at the finish line, both sides have engaged in increasingly harsh rhetoric about how they’ll handle China. This is due largely to voters’ concerns about American jobs moving overseas, the amount of U.S. debt held by China, and the U.S.-China trade deficit. Romney says one of the first things he’ll do in office is to label China a currency manipulator, something the Obama administration has not done, and claims Obama has a record of being too soft on China.

As the presidential race arrives at the finish line, both sides have engaged in increasingly harsh rhetoric about how they’ll handle China. This is due largely to voters’ concerns about American jobs moving overseas, the amount of U.S. debt held by China, and the U.S.-China trade deficit. Romney says one of the first things he’ll do in office is to label China a currency manipulator, something the Obama administration has not done, and claims Obama has a record of being too soft on China. (Check out this Romney campaign ad attacking Obama on China.) Obama in turn defends his administration’s record of bringing trade cases against China and attacks Romney for making money by doing business with Chinese companies during his time with Bain Capital (shown in the Obama campaign’s response to the Romney ad above). However, there are several crucial points that voters might miss if they’re only watching the campaign ads.

1. What are the real differences between Obama and Romney’s positions on China? Who is being dishonest (or at the very least misleading)?

Despite the antagonistic language used on the campaign trail, there’s not as much as difference between the candidates as you might think, and both of them have been misleading.

Both Obama and Romney pledge to be more aggressive in enforcing trade deals with other countries -- especially China. The two candidates also vigorously defend high-profile agreements that send U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas. Unsurprisingly, they are also both guilty of misconstruing the facts in order to garner votes. According to Time, “Both sides’ attacks are misleading — and, like so much campaign rhetoric, drastically oversimplified.” When it comes to Romney’s attacks, U.S. exports to China have actually boomed during the Obama administration, and Obama has done more than past presidents to protect U.S. trade interests, including imposing tariffs on Chinese solar panels and tires. The attacks on Romney’s China record don’t hold up either. Romney wasn’t actively running Bain when it invested in companies that outsourced jobs, and while Romney likely profited from such investments anyway, Bain was neither the only firm engaging in the practice nor the first.

2. How much influence has China had on U.S. economic woes?

There are links that exist, but the situation is being drastically oversimplified in the campaign.

The trade deficit with China has indeed had an impact on the U.S. economy. According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, “Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011, with job losses in every state.”

On the other hand, one must remember that China is currently the U.S.’s fourth largest trading partner, and the two are inextricably economically linked. Thus, it is in the U.S.’s best interest for the Chinese economy to continue to flourish. As the Washington Post puts it, “China and the United States are the twin engines of global growth, and both need each other to take steps to keep economic activity going.” It’s this latter point that you won’t see coming up in the campaign ads.

3. What exactly happens if China is labeled a currency manipulator?

Labeling China a currency manipulator would really just mean that the Treasury Department would have to negotiate with China over the price of its currency, something it has already been doing for some time.

However, if that translates into corresponding legislation such as tariffs, the situation could escalate into a trade war. (It’s worth noting that this is something that Romney told the Wall Street Journal is “the last thing I want.”) A trade war would lead to falling American exports to China and more expensive Chinese imports. According to a recent Brookings analysis, “In the worst case, a Romney decision to go to the brink with Beijing on the value of its currency would result in a mutually damaging trade war that slowed economic growth and increased unemployment in both countries and caused inflation and higher interest rates in the United States.”

4. What effect is all this anti-China rhetoric having on Sino-U.S. bilateral relations? In other words, how is China perceiving this?

Unsurprisingly, China is not too happy with all this.

In response to the Romney ad mentioned above, Chinese state media called it “ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician’s wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics.” But will this actually translate into any sort of action? According to the same Chinese state media source, if Romney’s “mud-slinging tactics were to become U.S. government policies, a trade war would be very likely to break out between the world’s top two economies, which would be catastrophic enough to both sides and the already groaning global economy.” However, we can only speculate about whether whoever takes office will actually act as harshly with China as he says he will on the campaign trail.

There’s a serious “chicken and the egg” problem with public opinion when it comes to China in this campaign. The American public is worried about China’s rise (more worried about than the experts, according to this fascinating Pew poll), so the candidates act tough on China to garner votes, spouting oversimplified sloganeering rhetoric, which makes the public even more worried about China, and so on. I can only hope that once the election is over this vicious cycle will be broken and our national politicians will no longer have an incentive to so mislead their constituents on the China threat.   

The question then becomes whether the worry they’ve stirred up during the campaign will impact the foreign policy that follows. Will the extent to which misleading campaign rhetoric has amplified American fears about China’s rise then constrain whoever becomes president such that he must pursue a very aggressive foreign policy towards China? Given that the Pew poll analysis predicts that the experts counseling the president will advocate a less hawkish plan of action, there’s good reason to be skeptical.

Leslie Bull is a Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network Senior Fellow for Defense and Diplomacy.

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Transition Tasks: Rethink Presidential Leadership

Nov 6, 2012Bo Cutter

If Obama gets a second term today, one of his biggest tasks will be showing strong leadership.

If Obama gets a second term today, one of his biggest tasks will be showing strong leadership.

A re-elected President Obama faces difficult choices, as every commentator will say tiresomely and ad nauseam. But more importantly, he also has a huge and unique opportunity. The media will inevitably begin to write its ritual story regarding who would want to be president, how daunting the problems are, and on and on. Don't take this seriously; certainly the media doesn't. It's just one of those stories the formula requires them to write. In fact, my guess is that both President Obama and Governor Romney saw somewhat similar versions of the opportunity and badly wanted to be the president who seized it. 

There are two parts to the opportunity. First, a reelected President Obama has by my figuring the first mostly clear, uncluttered second term since Ronald Reagan. And second, America is slowly, but with increasing strength, emerging from the Great Recession. Our economy is the best positioned in the developed world. We have a new growth model available to us, if we will reach for it. And the political stars could be aligned.

But we will need the element I haven't mentioned yet: the political leadership to see the opportunity and do something about it. Neither campaign has shown much if any evidence that this leadership is likely to be forthcoming. If he were elected, Governor Romney would take a long time to extract himself from the commitments he made to his party's far right. He certainly took every chance to re-reverse himself in the last few weeks of the campaign, and the Etch-a-Sketch would be furiously at work, but it would take two years to get himself in a position to lead anywhere.

President Obama has all of the right personality traits and at times he has shown real flashes, but he hasn't been the leader he should be, and he often hasn't shown the steel leadership requires. If he has a second term, what does he have to know and what does he have to do?

He has to know himself and he has to reflect deeply on what he now knows about the presidency. He came into office unprepared for hard-edged executive leadership and it showed. His training wasn't the best possible. While I'm reasonably convinced that the worse possible prep for the presidency is running a buy-out firm, I wouldn't argue that being a constitutional law professor at an elite university and augmenting that with four years in the U.S. Senate is great background either. In a debate, I'd take the "pro" side that it is anti-training. So President Obama had to surmount his wonderful resume. One hopes he has the humility to reflect in private on how tough the journey has been. 

But what should he have learned and what should he now do? Here are five possible lessons and four possible actions.

First,  the presidency is not a high intensity management job, but rather the highest intensity leadership job in the world. Everything in the White House has to be organized around presenting the right decisions and choices to the president, helping the president make decisions, and then getting things done in a divided political system, across an immense bureaucracy, for a continental nation.

I am not certain this describes the first-term White House, but I am certain the president should ask someone he trusts to take a very hard look at structure, processes, and people. The president has to be tough-minded about this. Second terms don't last very long and he doesn't have forever to start. (On a related topic, Erskine Bowles is famous for the following advice about staffing a White House: "Tell your friends from home to stay at home.")

Second, focus, time, and energy are essential to get any message through to a big, busy, and polarized continental nation. A president simply cannot have a priority of the week or even four or five big priorities in a term. To get anything done he has to stay with a problem for years, and as much as elite professors may hate the idea, you actually have to market your policies. The White House basically forgot this for the whole middle two years of the first term.

Third, every choice presented to a president is a 49.99-50.01 choice, and events -- as Harold MacMillan, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, famously said -- always intervene, usually in the worst possible way. But maintaining any steadiness and consistency in the face of 1,000 necessary but unrelated decisions, during completely unpredictable events, is flat impossible without a direction, a priority, and a plan.

I think the direction has to be economic growth. The president has to tell the NEC at the White House to lay out a growth vision, and if it can't, he ought to get another NEC.

And he has to sell whatever vision or priority he decides on. This means creating an actual plan, allocating his time, assigning big tasks to the Cabinet, and thinking ahead about this marketing effort. But all of this is what White Houses are supposed to do, what they have to be structured to do. In our system, the only real source of steady energy is the presidency.

Fourth, a president never has a stable coalition. He is in the negotiating business 24 hours a day. This means compromise isn't inherently evil and achieving durable solutions requires steel, not bonhomie. I'd make two bets. First, after the election there will be actual pragmatists in the Republican Party who both want to accomplish something and, in any case, think that politically they have to accomplish something. Second, the American people are sick to death of the unending quarrels in Washington and are far more ready than the politicians or the ideologues on both ends of the spectrum for a set of pragmatic compromises and for courage. So the president has to ask himself what does he need to get things done and then figure out who will do it with him.

But to do this, a president has to believe that deals aren't evil and, more significantly, that deals can lead -- if you are smart -- to better, more creative directions than anything you came up with on your own. Wyden-Bennett, which we didn't pursue, was a better and genuinely bipartisan health reform approach.

On occasion, a president has to show the steel, the hammer that sometimes is all that can make hard deals happen. Doing this may involve taking major but calculated risks. White Houses -- which are mostly royal courts -- aren't good at this. The courtiers are never going to tell the president something he doesn't want to hear unless he makes clear he'll listen.

And fifth, a president has to care and believe. In times of great change, presidents have to provide a bridge -- they become the bridge -- between an unsustainable present and an uncertain future. For Americans to cross that bridge, they have to believe that the president cares about them and believes deeply in the directions he is proposing. Cool, abstract, ironic detachment doesn't work. Simplicity, consistency, showing up, working on the problem, being completely honest about difficulties do work. The president's demeanor and style in the first debate will never work. But his approach to the second two debates was vastly better not just for the debates but as examples of presidential leadership. He was mostly calm, he showed flashes of real anger, and he was completely engaged. That president could convince the American people that he believed, cared, and had the courage to act.

A very long time ago, I found myself in a late-night conversation in Cronin's bar in Cambridge, Mass. I was talking to a graduate student maybe 10 years older who had been wounded and highly decorated for leading his Marine rifle platoon out of the Pusan Reservoir disaster during the Korean War. I asked him how he could possibly have done it.  And he said he didn't do it, he faked it. He said he had been terrified and thought it was hopeless and his sergeant pulled him aside and said, "You are going to get us all killed. You don't have to tell the men how to fight, they were trained and they know. You don't have to decide on our tactics, that's mostly my job. But you do have to f*****g lead us and you have to act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Because we need that and there's no one else but you."

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic Presidents.

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Election Day Non-Election Links

Nov 6, 2012Mike Konczal

Today is election day. Here's what I wrote about the stakes for Dodd-Frank and the election earlier this year at the Washington Monthly, with a quick update here.

Here are some non-election links for you to check out in between obsessively refreshing all your favorite election sites:

Today is election day. Here's what I wrote about the stakes for Dodd-Frank and the election earlier this year at the Washington Monthly, with a quick update here.

Here are some non-election links for you to check out in between obsessively refreshing all your favorite election sites:

Molly Knefel on contrasting her experiences teaching young black children under intense police scrunity with her brother, John, being arrested at an Occupy event.

Sarah Jaffe on Occupy's afterlife in building community power in places devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

Ben Adler on a 2010 MoMA exhibit on combating rising sea levels, revisiting what was discussed after having gone through Sandy. Also Matt Yglesias on using the Dutch as an example to save New York from future floodings.

N+1 Election Preview. Ok, one election link. N+1 has a crew of fantastic writers, and it is great to get the take of intelligent people who don't cover/write about this stuff for a living.

Jeremy Kessler on Justice Kennedy and civil liberties versus libertarianism. I'm going to do more with this shortly, but I really like the way he poses the problem of how do civil libertarians deal with the issue of public power. I (and many others) were caught off guard by the ACLU, etc. endorsed of Citizens United; Kesller approaches this issue through the Kennedy dissent on Obamacare.

I covered the new unemployment numbers at The American Prospect last week.

I went out looking for economics based arguments for anti-gouging laws. Three I found: Cheap Talk's Jeffrey C. Ely argues here that efficiency can be outweighed by excessive producer surplus, Andrew Bossie uses an island model here, and Jason Thomas here on tumblr makes additional points.

I started a tumblr, and may keep it going. (I enjoyed having tumblr search my gmail for friends with tumblrs and seeing how many people started one about 18 months ago, posted 3 things, and then forgot about it.) Feel free to "ask me anything," especially if you need an election break, and I'll be happy to respond on the tumblr.

Oh and one last time, the Herman Cain ad where his chief of staff, Mark Block, talks about the campaign and then has a smoke (and ends with Cain's smile). The Tea Party anthem, I Am America, gets stuck in my head immediately.

See you on the other side....

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FDR's Message to Obama and Romney: America's Strength Abroad Begins at Home

Oct 29, 2012David Woolner

FDR knew that America's willingness to fight inequality was more important than its ability to wage war.

Our strength is measured not only in terms of the might of our armaments. It is measured not only in terms of the horsepower of our machines.

The true measure of our strength lies deeply imbedded in the social and economic justice of the system in which we live.

FDR knew that America's willingness to fight inequality was more important than its ability to wage war.

Our strength is measured not only in terms of the might of our armaments. It is measured not only in terms of the horsepower of our machines.

The true measure of our strength lies deeply imbedded in the social and economic justice of the system in which we live.

For you can build ships and tanks and planes and guns galore; but they will not be enough. You must place behind them an invincible faith in the institutions which they have been built to defend. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938

In their recent debate on foreign policy, both President Obama and Governor Romney made a point of linking America’s security with the health of the U.S. economy. Governor Romney, for example, argued that the ability of the United States to promote “the principles of peace” abroad “begins with a strong economy here at home,” while President Obama said that thanks to our experiments with nation-building in places like Iraq, “we've neglected…developing our own economy, our own energy sectors, our own education system. And it's very hard for us to project leadership around the world when we're not doing what we need to do here.”

Both candidates are correct, of course, in pointing out that a healthy economy—and in Mr. Obama’s case, a healthy education system and energy sector—are critical to the overall strength of the nation and hence our ability to project American influence overseas. But as has been the case with so much of this campaign, neither man had much to say about another critical element of national health that also plays an important part in our foreign policy: the social health of the nation.

Roughly 70 years ago, when the United States was living in a far more dangerous world than we are living in today, Franklin Roosevelt argued that America’s place in the world was not merely dependent on our military and economic power, but also dependent on our ability to create a society where social and economic justice were paramount. For Roosevelt, this meant building a nation which, in “arming itself for defense has also the intelligence to save its human resources by giving them that confidence which comes from useful work,” which in “creating a great navy has also found the strength to build houses and begin to clear the slums of its cities and its countryside,” and which as “the industrial leader of the world has the humanity to know that the people of a free land need not suffer the disease of poverty and the dread of not being wanted.”

Indeed, in gazing out over a world where anti-democratic forces were on the march, Roosevelt also insisted that “unhappy events abroad” had “re-taught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.” The first truth was that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

For Roosevelt and the generation that lived through the Depression and war, these truths were very real, and as such the conviction that the health and strength of the nation were linked directly to its ability to deliver social and economic justice for all its people was regarded, not as a luxury, but as a critical component of national security.

And yet on the campaign trail today we hear very little about the vital need to address the same disturbing trends that FDR warned us about all those decades ago: the vast and growing unequal distribution of wealth among the American people, the dangers of the rise of “private power” to the exercise of democracy, the fact that in America today roughly one-third of our citizens have rejoined the ranks of the poor or near poor.

No, instead what we hear is an endless stream of uninspiring messages about each candidate’s “plans” to create jobs, reduce the deficit, and “keep America strong.” But after living through four long years of the Great Recession and bearing witness to a society where 400 individuals now own more wealth that the bottom 150 million combined, the American people deserve more than mere platitudes. They want to hear their leaders articulate a vision for America that involves the creation of a better and more just society, a society that will inspire what Roosevelt called “the anguished common people of this earth.”

President Obama has offered hints of this in his call to move the country forward, but in the dangerous world that our parents and grandparents inhabited, Franklin Roosevelt went much further. In the final and anxious days of the 1940 election, for example, he reminded his fellow citizens that they were a generation living in “a tremendous moment of history,” where the “surge of events abroad” had led some to ask whether “the book of democracy” might “now to be closed and placed away upon the dusty shelves of time.” For Roosevelt the answer was clear and unequivocal:

All we have known of the glories of democracy—its freedom, its efficiency as a mode of living, its ability to meet the aspirations of the common man— all these are merely an introduction to the greater story of a more glorious future.

We Americans of today—all of us—we are characters in this living book of democracy.

But we are also its author. It falls upon us now to say whether the chapters that are to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance.

I believe that the American people will say: "Forward!"

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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Felicia Wong on Melissa Harris-Perry: Millennial Voters are Values-Driven

Oct 29, 2012

It was only four years ago that the media was abuzz with the idea that Millennials were over the moon for candidate Obama. But are they still interested in President Obama? Roosevelt Institute President and CEO Felicia Wong joined the Melissa Harris-Perry show to offer an affirmative. But all presidential campaigns have to "reinvent the way [Millennials] engage in the politlcal process," Felicia points out. "This is both a values-drven generation but also a really practical generation" that wants solutions:

It was only four years ago that the media was abuzz with the idea that Millennials were over the moon for candidate Obama. But are they still interested in President Obama? Roosevelt Institute President and CEO Felicia Wong joined the Melissa Harris-Perry show to offer an affirmative. But all presidential campaigns have to "reinvent the way [Millennials] engage in the politlcal process," Felicia points out. "This is both a values-drven generation but also a really practical generation" that wants solutions:

The Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network sees firsthand that "young people are motivated by values, they are motivated by high ideals," Felicia says. "What they also want to do is engage in their own communities" with solutions they generate and implement themselves.

So when any politician falls back on canned remarks, Millennials will tune out. In the below clip Felicia argues that "this isn't a talking points generation." That's in part why they're still enthused about Obama: "When the president respects them by explaining policies in that professorial manner," she says, "that's very connecting for them."

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