FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
WORD
We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages - FDR, 1940
HISTORY'S HINTS FOR DEMOCRATS
A STUDY OF the past brings forth some strong hints of how the Democrats might recover from their present difficulties. For example, while the media has inundated the public with talk of blue and red states, such a dichotomy does not reveal which states won by the GOP are vulnerable to change.
If you define a safe Republican state as one in which the candidate received over 55%, then the GOP states plummet to 21 in the last election. In all the other states, the Democrats were either safe - there are five of those - or one needs only change the mind of not more than 5.1% of the voters to win - voters who are already uncertain or fed up with the choices of the past and susceptible to the most hated thing in today's politics: a new approach. Even more significantly, the number of safe GOP states is less than half as many as in Richard Nixon's comfort zone and about half as many as Reagan enjoyed.
In other words, GOP support is broad but it isn't as deep as it has been in the not too distant past. Furthermore, the number of safe states shows a clear downward trend over three decades from the 46 under Nixon to 21 in the last election.
When placed on a map, these states still occupy far more geographical space than their population would suggest, but it is a distinctly different picture than the one people have been seeing of late. For example, eleven of the states up for grabs are not on either the Atlantic or Pacific coast and six of them border the shores of the Mississippi River.
Even more interesting, of the 21 safe GOP states, 11 have above average poverty, 12 have below average income and 8 have severe drought problems. If you didn't know they were sacred GOP turf, you might think they were excellent organizing ground for the Democrats.
Finally, 15 of these untouchable states, allegedly impenetrable behind their walls of faith-based family values, have above average divorce rates - all of them at least 90% greater than despicable, godless Massachusetts.
Yet while the presidential base for Republicans has become less secure, Democrats have lost ground in the House and the Senate. Their margins actually peaked in 1937, but checking the last 60 years you find something that directly contradicts the popular assumption that Democrats do best when acting like low-carb Republicans.
For example, party margins in the House increased under classic Democrats Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ. Even when the party was out of the White House during the Eisenhower years the Democrats did well in Congress.
Then began a descent into confused messages combined with a rightward drift. By the time Clinton came along, the Vichy Democrats were strongly in control. Clinton won - largely because Perot was in the race - but was of little or no help getting Democrats into Congress - up two in the Senate, down 18 in the House. Clinton was the first incoming Democrat in 60 years not to have any coattails. Worst, during the Clinton administration, elected Democrats at every level did worse than under any incumbent since Grover Cleveland.
In short, despite the propaganda to the contrary loyally dispensed by a gullible media, the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Third Wave, and the Clintons has been a bust.
Meanwhile, the two essential qualities of successful Democratic campaigns - a populist platform aimed at doing the mostest for the mostest while helping the weakest become part of the mostest - combined with a fervent vision of a future worth fighting for - simply disappeared. Why didn't the Vichy Democrats do better?One reason is because both swing voters and non-voters tend to dislike a politics that is over-contentious and under-differentiated.
Here, for example, are some comments of non-voters in an English study, although they might as well have been Americans:
"In the old days you had Labour on the left and Conservatives on the right and they had certain ideas of what was what. Now they are in the middle and you don't necessarily know what's going on or how it affects you."
"They all do the same things, they all promise to do the same things."
"This time I felt there was no distinction, they were all muddled into one and it's not going to work. I don't see the point in having a Government if you also haven't got a reasonable opposition, it just doesn't work. You need that, you need two separate parties and that's what we haven't got now. I didn't vote this time because the parties all seemed the same."
And this from study by Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer, associate professors at Northwestern University's School of Journalism:
"Nonvoters as well as now-and-then voters see politicians as almost a separate class, who say what they think voters want to hear in language that's not straightforward and whose sole mission is winning. Across groups, participants in our 2001 focus groups mentioned that candidates spend a lot of time putting one another down. . . . A young nonvoter said, simply, 'I think they should spend less time bashing the other person and more time telling how it is, what their views are, and how they are going to. . . change the country.' "
In the focus groups, the role of candidates' advisers particularly was criticized as intrusive and manipulative. . . Politicians are 'like a package,' or a 'super package,' according to two female nonvoters. 'You feel like you're just hearing that script over and over and you know it's not coming from them, it's coming from their script writer and so it turns a lot of people off.'"
A review of Doppelt and Shearer's work notes that "In the 1996 elections, 73% of nonvoters were 18 to 44 years old. 39% were under age 30. 48% make less than $30,000 per year. 30% identified themselves as minorities." And the study also found that 52% agreed with the statement: "The federal government often does a better job than people give it credit for." 83% of nonvoters thought the government should have a major policy role in the realms of healthcare, housing, and education.
While a follow-up study in 2000 found that nonvoters divided pretty much the same way as voters on the presidency, the fact that they didn't do anything about it was more telling. Besides, we're talking about a huge number of people. If those of voting age had simply turned out in the last election in the same proportion as they had in 1960, there would have been 24 million more voters, nearly 25% more cast ballots. That's a lot of people looking for some difference between the candidates and some new directions.
The party, increasingly controlled by lobbyists and big contributors and increasingly corrupt, no longer exudes its old atmosphere of a circus filled with tigers, trapeze artists, clowns, and grotesque figures, an implicit sign that anyone could be a Democrat. It now looks and feels like C-SPAN; its policies opaque, its candidates dull, and its range of interests ever narrower, its hospitality lacking. In short, history joins common sense in arguing that if the Democratic Party were to return to a broad based politics based on the improvement of the economic, educational, and social conditions of average Americans it might once again become the dominant force in this country. Certainly, following the alternative urged by the Vichy Democrats has been a disaster.
HISTORY HINTS FOR DEMOCRATS
Permanent link with charts
http://prorev.com/demhist.htm
POLITICS
ICKES BACKS DEAN FOR DNC CHAIR
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050128/ap_on_re_us/democrats_chair_3
WILL LESTER, AP - Harold Ickes, a leading Democratic activist and former aide to President Clinton, said Friday he is backing Howard Dean to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee — giving a powerful boost to the front-runner. . . Ickes, who heads the political action committee of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites), D-N.Y., said the endorsement was his alone and "does not reflect Sen. Clinton's opinion." While Ickes would not comment on the Clintons' preferences, he is a close ally and would not be endorsing Dean against their strong objections. No one was immediately available in Sen. Clinton's office to comment.
WORLD
CIA JOINS THE REVIEW IN VIEW THAT U.S. IS DECLINING POWER
http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112697&
2020 FRED KAPLAN, SLATE - Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council, the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.
The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players - similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century - will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.
In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order" - probably the single most powerful country - but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"- not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others - will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.
HEALTH & SCIENCE
46 LAWSUITS FILED AGAINST TAX EXEMPT HOSPITALS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45531-2005Jan28.html
CECI CONNOLLY WASHINGTON POST - Forty-six suits have been filed in 22 states, including one against Virginia's Inova Health System, alleging the hospitals violate their tax-exempt status by charging uninsured patients the highest rates and employing abusive tactics to collect. "Their goal is to discourage these uninsured patients from returning," said Richard F. Scruggs, the lead attorney. "If they paid taxes, I couldn't complain. But these hospitals are given freedom from taxation for doing something." Included in the cases is a California hospital with $1 million in an offshore bank account, another in Louisiana that owns a luxury hotel and health clubs, and a Georgia hospital that flew its executives on private jets to meetings in the Cayman Islands and Florida's Amelia Island. Because private insurers and the government negotiate deep discounts for their clients, the uninsured are usually the only ones charged the list price -- up to six times as much as for insured patients.
MONEY
FATHER OF NEO-FREE MARKET THEORIES ATTACKS SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
LISA RONER, ETHICALCORP - Arthur Laffer, an economist commonly known as the 'father' of supply-side economics, has denounced corporate social responsibility, calling it detrimental to stockholders' interests and harmful to corporate profitability. . . At a news conference organized by the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute last week, Laffer said corporate responsibility really means "irresponsibility" and that modern corporations are simply meant to create wealth for shareholders. Companies, Laffer says, are under pressure from "mainly left-of-center lobbies" to demonstrate attention to social and environmental concerns as much as to bottom lines. But he says that puts businesses on the defensive when their chief executives should be realizing corporations are "legitimate entities whose prime responsibility is to make profits for those who have invested in them". A study he conducted with two other economists, Andrew Coors and Wayne Winegarden, Laffer says shows "no significant positive correlation" between corporate responsibility and business profitability. . . Lawrence Mitchell, John Theodore Fey research Professor of Law at George Washington University, law director of the Sloan Program for the Study of Business in Society and director of the International Institute for Corporate Governance and Accountability, says Laffer "misses the point entirely." "Social responsibility is not necessarily to increase profitability --- it's to increase profitability responsibly," Mitchell says. "We have this idea --- and Laffer certainly seems to be buying into it --- that the corporation is somehow some sort of natural entity with unrestricted property rights to do whatever the hell it wants." But Mitchell says, with a broad range of laws "designed to ensure property use is responsible", corporations are called upon to increase profits in a "non-abusive, non-externalising sort of fashion".
SCHOOLS
Stupid school administrator tricks
STUDENT SUSPENDED FOR WRITING PROTEST LETTER
shiso@gis.net watershed@gis.net shiso@gis.net marcmorano@aol.com http://www.post-trib.com/cgi-bin/pto-story/news/z1/01-28-05_z1_news_09.html
PITTSBURGH POST-TRIBUNE - A Portage student's punishment for writing and printing 200 protest letters over new school policies is taking on tones of a 1960s U.S. Supreme Court case. Tyler Zilz, a sixth-grader at the Willowcreek Middle School, said he received a one-day, in-school suspension Wednesday for writing a three-page protest letter and passing some of the copies out to his classmates. In the letter, which he wrote with the help of this brother Eric, a Willowcreek eighth-grader, he called for students to show their opposition to the rules.
Since Monday, all students have been prevented from wandering halls before the start of school and roaming the cafeteria during lunch period. The moves were designed to make it easier to monitor students, said Andrew Halaschak, Willowcreek's principal. Students haven't been happy with the changes.
"We, as a student body, we are strong," Zilz wrote. "We are also intelligent enough to realize an unfair judgment when we see it." He encouraged students to wear white shirts and blue pants this week to protest. Reports have filtered out that some students are following the protest dress. . .
Zilz's mother, Sherry, said she was called to the school and signed a letter for Halaschak accepting the suspension. She said Halaschak said her son's letters were "interfering with the educational process."
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source
E-MAIL: mailto:news@prorev.com
WORD
We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages - FDR, 1940
HISTORY'S HINTS FOR DEMOCRATS
A STUDY OF the past brings forth some strong hints of how the Democrats might recover from their present difficulties. For example, while the media has inundated the public with talk of blue and red states, such a dichotomy does not reveal which states won by the GOP are vulnerable to change.
If you define a safe Republican state as one in which the candidate received over 55%, then the GOP states plummet to 21 in the last election. In all the other states, the Democrats were either safe - there are five of those - or one needs only change the mind of not more than 5.1% of the voters to win - voters who are already uncertain or fed up with the choices of the past and susceptible to the most hated thing in today's politics: a new approach. Even more significantly, the number of safe GOP states is less than half as many as in Richard Nixon's comfort zone and about half as many as Reagan enjoyed.
In other words, GOP support is broad but it isn't as deep as it has been in the not too distant past. Furthermore, the number of safe states shows a clear downward trend over three decades from the 46 under Nixon to 21 in the last election.
When placed on a map, these states still occupy far more geographical space than their population would suggest, but it is a distinctly different picture than the one people have been seeing of late. For example, eleven of the states up for grabs are not on either the Atlantic or Pacific coast and six of them border the shores of the Mississippi River.
Even more interesting, of the 21 safe GOP states, 11 have above average poverty, 12 have below average income and 8 have severe drought problems. If you didn't know they were sacred GOP turf, you might think they were excellent organizing ground for the Democrats.
Finally, 15 of these untouchable states, allegedly impenetrable behind their walls of faith-based family values, have above average divorce rates - all of them at least 90% greater than despicable, godless Massachusetts.
Yet while the presidential base for Republicans has become less secure, Democrats have lost ground in the House and the Senate. Their margins actually peaked in 1937, but checking the last 60 years you find something that directly contradicts the popular assumption that Democrats do best when acting like low-carb Republicans.
For example, party margins in the House increased under classic Democrats Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ. Even when the party was out of the White House during the Eisenhower years the Democrats did well in Congress.
Then began a descent into confused messages combined with a rightward drift. By the time Clinton came along, the Vichy Democrats were strongly in control. Clinton won - largely because Perot was in the race - but was of little or no help getting Democrats into Congress - up two in the Senate, down 18 in the House. Clinton was the first incoming Democrat in 60 years not to have any coattails. Worst, during the Clinton administration, elected Democrats at every level did worse than under any incumbent since Grover Cleveland.
In short, despite the propaganda to the contrary loyally dispensed by a gullible media, the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Third Wave, and the Clintons has been a bust.
Meanwhile, the two essential qualities of successful Democratic campaigns - a populist platform aimed at doing the mostest for the mostest while helping the weakest become part of the mostest - combined with a fervent vision of a future worth fighting for - simply disappeared. Why didn't the Vichy Democrats do better?One reason is because both swing voters and non-voters tend to dislike a politics that is over-contentious and under-differentiated.
Here, for example, are some comments of non-voters in an English study, although they might as well have been Americans:
"In the old days you had Labour on the left and Conservatives on the right and they had certain ideas of what was what. Now they are in the middle and you don't necessarily know what's going on or how it affects you."
"They all do the same things, they all promise to do the same things."
"This time I felt there was no distinction, they were all muddled into one and it's not going to work. I don't see the point in having a Government if you also haven't got a reasonable opposition, it just doesn't work. You need that, you need two separate parties and that's what we haven't got now. I didn't vote this time because the parties all seemed the same."
And this from study by Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer, associate professors at Northwestern University's School of Journalism:
"Nonvoters as well as now-and-then voters see politicians as almost a separate class, who say what they think voters want to hear in language that's not straightforward and whose sole mission is winning. Across groups, participants in our 2001 focus groups mentioned that candidates spend a lot of time putting one another down. . . . A young nonvoter said, simply, 'I think they should spend less time bashing the other person and more time telling how it is, what their views are, and how they are going to. . . change the country.' "
In the focus groups, the role of candidates' advisers particularly was criticized as intrusive and manipulative. . . Politicians are 'like a package,' or a 'super package,' according to two female nonvoters. 'You feel like you're just hearing that script over and over and you know it's not coming from them, it's coming from their script writer and so it turns a lot of people off.'"
A review of Doppelt and Shearer's work notes that "In the 1996 elections, 73% of nonvoters were 18 to 44 years old. 39% were under age 30. 48% make less than $30,000 per year. 30% identified themselves as minorities." And the study also found that 52% agreed with the statement: "The federal government often does a better job than people give it credit for." 83% of nonvoters thought the government should have a major policy role in the realms of healthcare, housing, and education.
While a follow-up study in 2000 found that nonvoters divided pretty much the same way as voters on the presidency, the fact that they didn't do anything about it was more telling. Besides, we're talking about a huge number of people. If those of voting age had simply turned out in the last election in the same proportion as they had in 1960, there would have been 24 million more voters, nearly 25% more cast ballots. That's a lot of people looking for some difference between the candidates and some new directions.
The party, increasingly controlled by lobbyists and big contributors and increasingly corrupt, no longer exudes its old atmosphere of a circus filled with tigers, trapeze artists, clowns, and grotesque figures, an implicit sign that anyone could be a Democrat. It now looks and feels like C-SPAN; its policies opaque, its candidates dull, and its range of interests ever narrower, its hospitality lacking. In short, history joins common sense in arguing that if the Democratic Party were to return to a broad based politics based on the improvement of the economic, educational, and social conditions of average Americans it might once again become the dominant force in this country. Certainly, following the alternative urged by the Vichy Democrats has been a disaster.
HISTORY HINTS FOR DEMOCRATS
Permanent link with charts
http://prorev.com/demhist.htm
POLITICS
ICKES BACKS DEAN FOR DNC CHAIR
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050128/ap_on_re_us/democrats_chair_3
WILL LESTER, AP - Harold Ickes, a leading Democratic activist and former aide to President Clinton, said Friday he is backing Howard Dean to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee — giving a powerful boost to the front-runner. . . Ickes, who heads the political action committee of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites), D-N.Y., said the endorsement was his alone and "does not reflect Sen. Clinton's opinion." While Ickes would not comment on the Clintons' preferences, he is a close ally and would not be endorsing Dean against their strong objections. No one was immediately available in Sen. Clinton's office to comment.
WORLD
CIA JOINS THE REVIEW IN VIEW THAT U.S. IS DECLINING POWER
http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112697&
2020 FRED KAPLAN, SLATE - Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council, the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.
The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players - similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century - will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.
In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order" - probably the single most powerful country - but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"- not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others - will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.
HEALTH & SCIENCE
46 LAWSUITS FILED AGAINST TAX EXEMPT HOSPITALS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45531-2005Jan28.html
CECI CONNOLLY WASHINGTON POST - Forty-six suits have been filed in 22 states, including one against Virginia's Inova Health System, alleging the hospitals violate their tax-exempt status by charging uninsured patients the highest rates and employing abusive tactics to collect. "Their goal is to discourage these uninsured patients from returning," said Richard F. Scruggs, the lead attorney. "If they paid taxes, I couldn't complain. But these hospitals are given freedom from taxation for doing something." Included in the cases is a California hospital with $1 million in an offshore bank account, another in Louisiana that owns a luxury hotel and health clubs, and a Georgia hospital that flew its executives on private jets to meetings in the Cayman Islands and Florida's Amelia Island. Because private insurers and the government negotiate deep discounts for their clients, the uninsured are usually the only ones charged the list price -- up to six times as much as for insured patients.
MONEY
FATHER OF NEO-FREE MARKET THEORIES ATTACKS SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
LISA RONER, ETHICALCORP - Arthur Laffer, an economist commonly known as the 'father' of supply-side economics, has denounced corporate social responsibility, calling it detrimental to stockholders' interests and harmful to corporate profitability. . . At a news conference organized by the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute last week, Laffer said corporate responsibility really means "irresponsibility" and that modern corporations are simply meant to create wealth for shareholders. Companies, Laffer says, are under pressure from "mainly left-of-center lobbies" to demonstrate attention to social and environmental concerns as much as to bottom lines. But he says that puts businesses on the defensive when their chief executives should be realizing corporations are "legitimate entities whose prime responsibility is to make profits for those who have invested in them". A study he conducted with two other economists, Andrew Coors and Wayne Winegarden, Laffer says shows "no significant positive correlation" between corporate responsibility and business profitability. . . Lawrence Mitchell, John Theodore Fey research Professor of Law at George Washington University, law director of the Sloan Program for the Study of Business in Society and director of the International Institute for Corporate Governance and Accountability, says Laffer "misses the point entirely." "Social responsibility is not necessarily to increase profitability --- it's to increase profitability responsibly," Mitchell says. "We have this idea --- and Laffer certainly seems to be buying into it --- that the corporation is somehow some sort of natural entity with unrestricted property rights to do whatever the hell it wants." But Mitchell says, with a broad range of laws "designed to ensure property use is responsible", corporations are called upon to increase profits in a "non-abusive, non-externalising sort of fashion".
SCHOOLS
Stupid school administrator tricks
STUDENT SUSPENDED FOR WRITING PROTEST LETTER
shiso@gis.net watershed@gis.net shiso@gis.net marcmorano@aol.com http://www.post-trib.com/cgi-bin/pto-story/news/z1/01-28-05_z1_news_09.html
PITTSBURGH POST-TRIBUNE - A Portage student's punishment for writing and printing 200 protest letters over new school policies is taking on tones of a 1960s U.S. Supreme Court case. Tyler Zilz, a sixth-grader at the Willowcreek Middle School, said he received a one-day, in-school suspension Wednesday for writing a three-page protest letter and passing some of the copies out to his classmates. In the letter, which he wrote with the help of this brother Eric, a Willowcreek eighth-grader, he called for students to show their opposition to the rules.
Since Monday, all students have been prevented from wandering halls before the start of school and roaming the cafeteria during lunch period. The moves were designed to make it easier to monitor students, said Andrew Halaschak, Willowcreek's principal. Students haven't been happy with the changes.
"We, as a student body, we are strong," Zilz wrote. "We are also intelligent enough to realize an unfair judgment when we see it." He encouraged students to wear white shirts and blue pants this week to protest. Reports have filtered out that some students are following the protest dress. . .
Zilz's mother, Sherry, said she was called to the school and signed a letter for Halaschak accepting the suspension. She said Halaschak said her son's letters were "interfering with the educational process."
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