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Democratic regrouping, redux

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After the election I wrote about the need for the Democrats to accept that one reason they lost the election was the paucity of ideas emerging from their camp. Several readers and fellow bloggers wrote in with pointers and comments, plus the debate in comments on that post was extraordinary.

One point my colleague Joan Walsh makes — which I’m hoping she’ll elaborate on in a piece she’s now writing — is that the Democrats have plenty of think tanks and plenty of ideas, but there seems to be a problem getting the ideas into the mouths and heads of the party’s leaders.

The One True Bix points to this article from The Hill about Democratic think tanks.

Dave Johnson wrote in to recommend the new Web site of the Commonweal Institute.

Several people wrote in to point to the Apple “Switch” ad parody at Working for Change. Clever as it is, it feels rather more desperate than funny to me.

Big Brother redux

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William Safire’s must-read column today reprises the reporting John Markoff did last week on the government’s plans for a master database of personal information. You thought online marketers were bad? Admiral John Poindexter (of Iran-contra scandal fame) is spearheading a plan — it’s currently a part of the Homeland Security Act, which is seemingly on the verge of passage into law — for “Total Information Awareness,” a centralized federal spy database with dossiers on every U.S. citizen.

It’s significant that the outcry against this plan is hailing not just from the left but from civil-libertarian conservatives like Safire. Safire, of course, served as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, where routine abuse of FBI files on American citizens was the order of the day. That era’s rampant and hideous misuse of government surveillance for private political ends should stand as a reminder of the perils in Poindexter’s plan.

(Different Strings has posts on this issue here and here, as well.)

Bin Laden pipes up

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So Osama bin Laden breaks his radio silence with an audiotape. Experts tell us it seems to be real and it seems to be bin Laden himself. It makes reference to recent events so it is unlikely to have been recorded a long time ago.

My colleague Joe Conason will have a lengthier piece on this up later this evening. In the mean time, various press accounts have wondered why we are hearing but not seeing the al-Qaida leader. For instance, here’s Nicholas Kulish in the Wall St. Journal: “The qustion remains why, if Mr. bin Laden is alive, no videos have been released.”

One possibility, of course, is that bin Laden is ill and not in good enough shape to show his face — it would dishearten his faithful followers. But another possibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that bin Laden and company learned their lesson from their videotape releases of last fall.

As you may recall, Western experts analyzed the rock formations behind bin Laden and tried to figure out his location from every possible clue on screen. The choice of audio this time might be simple prudence. Bin Laden has managed to elude American pursuit thus far, and he is presumably even less eager to be located today than he was a year ago.

Berkeley repels coffee purists

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Never let it be said that my home town never met a government regulation it didn’t like. In their infinite wisdom the citizens of Berkeley, California have defeated a local initiative that would have required our cafes to serve only “fair trade” or organic coffee. We may be a Nuclear Free Zone but we’re not going to turn our coffee into a political battleground. Hey, Peet’s and many other coffeehouses serve fair-trade coffee; you can vote with your order.

Bush wins; Greenspan cuts; markets fall

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Well, let’s see: Republicans take full control of every branch of government. Alan Greenspan whacks the federal funds rate again. And the stock market takes a big dive.

Could it be that Wall Street really wants Harvey Pitt back?

Or does the market see the combination of likely fat tax cuts and an expensive war with Iraq as leading to a deadly combo of Big Government and big federal debt — with no brakes?

I think investors may quickly come to miss the stalemates of split government.

Regroup, rethink, refund

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The Democratic party is now roughly in the same position the Republicans were in in the mid-1970s, when I came of voting age and began paying close attention to politics: They control neither the presidency nor either house of Congress, they have been soundly repudiated at the polls and they do not have a program.

What did the Republicans do in the 1970s? They went back to their roots and created institutions for the long-term. They spent money on think-tanks and local organizations and decided to build a new party from the ground up that appealed to conservatives. They elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the party they built then is the same party that Karl Rove is orchestrating today. The fringe-y think tanks of the ’70s — like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute — now provide an endless supply of talking-head and op-ed support for right-wing policies. And, give them credit, they’re just full of ideas.

If the Democratic Party today wants to move out of the wilderness it needs to learn from the Republicans of the 1970s. It needs to take most of that “soft money” and stop spending it on worthless campaign ads and instead start building the framework for an intellectual revitalization of their side of the aisle.

It’s not as if there aren’t tons of areas in which an effective alternative to Republican policy wouldn’t strike a chord with large numbers of Americans: Health care policy. Tax fairness. Corporate ethics. The vanishing middle class. Voting rights. You can keep going.

The Democrats just lost the Senate because they had no ideas and no program. (Even when Al Gore offered a spirited attack on Bush’s economic policy he failed to put forth any ideas of his own.) Of course the party faithful didn’t rally — there was nothing to rally behind. Voters need to be inspired by a vision, and until the Democrats find one they will continue to get kicked in the teeth.

Wellstone memorial low road?

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Perhaps you’ve followed the whole controversy over the Wellstone memorial: was it somehow “too political,” undignified in its championing of the liberal causes that were Wellstone’s mission in life? Joe Conason has been covering it well and thoroughly here in Salon. But Joe is an outspoken liberal Democrat who would, you know, be expected to take this position. Today I found myself in relatively rare agreement with cranky Slate blogster Mickey Kaus, who offers further good defense of the Wellstone event:

  People react to death with something less than rationality, often by plunging headlong into some action — any action — they can take that might restore some sense of control or efficacy. They found Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They file lawsuits, demand compensation, lobby for new procedures to make sure the plane never crashes/building never collapses/blood gets screened/airbag deploys. They campaign for Megan’s Law or the Amber Alert system. Or they try to win the Senate campaign the deceased was in the middle of fighting.

In the end, Wellstone was the sort of politician who actually cared about the issues he stood for, and the sooner we in the media move on from “who should have said what” questions about the memorial and back to matters of substance, the better.

The Pitts

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Let’s replay the sorry recent saga of the SEC’s accounting oversight board debacle:

(1) Back in September, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt told John Biggs of TIAA/CREF — according to Democratic members of the SEC and Biggs himself — that Biggs would be appointed to head a new accounting board, one promulgated in the wake of the past year’s scandals to restore some sense of trust in the profession.
(2) Biggs was perceived as being too tough on big accounting, and Pitt got cold feet or succumbed to pressure (he denies the latter) and pulled the plan to nominate him.
(3) Pitt chose former FBI chief William Webster to head the accounting board and rammed the appointment through the SEC in a party-line 3-2 vote. Webster’s lack of experience in corporate accounting was not, the world was assured, a problem.

Today, we learn that Webster actually told Pitt before the vote about what seems like a serious and highly relevant matter: Webster had till recently headed the audit committee of a corporation, U.S. Technologies, that was being charged with fraud.

Read this from the New York Times account:

  The small publicly traded company, U.S. Technologies, is now all but insolvent and it and its chief executive, C. Gregory Earls, are facing suits by investors who say they were defrauded of millions of dollars. The suits contend the misconduct occurred in late 2001 and this year. That was after the three-person audit committee, headed by Mr. Webster, had voted to dismiss the outside auditors in the summer of 2001 after those auditors raised concerns about internal financial controls.

So Webster told Pitt about this, and the response of Pitt’s SEC staff was “that the staff concluded that there was nothing worthy of passing on to other commissioners or that would disqualify Mr. Webster.”

Nothing worthy of passing on to other commissioners, who were about to enter a hotly contested vote on Webster’s appointment? When the SEC reviews the behavior of corporate officers and finds, for instance, that they have withheld key information from shareholders before a vote, the commission calls it “fraud.” This is why corporate reports, when prepared responsibly, are so full of disclaimers and disclosures of risk.

Pitt, who has always seemed barely conscious of the ethical dimensions of his role, can now legitimately be charged with having rigged a fraudulent vote on the accounting board position. The only seemly thing for William Webster to do now would be to refuse to serve. The only seemly thing for Pitt to do would be to resign.

Instead it seems that there is to be an investigation into the affair by — who else? — the SEC itself.

Tax debate spin control

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Brad DeLong takes out the scalpel and fillets Sen. Chuck Grassley’s letter to the editor of the New York Times defending the fairness of the Bush tax cuts (the first sentences below are Grassley; italics is DeLong reading the mind of the letter-writer):

  Some observers claim that 40 percent of last year’s tax cuts went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official, unbiased source, says the top 1 percent will receive 27 percent of the income tax cuts [see how I snuck “income tax” into this sentence? All but the most alert one percent of readers will believe that I am claiming that the 40 percent number is flat-out wrong. *Snort*!]

Large mountain, small bullets

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Britt Blaser offers this moving parable, from the author’s Air Force experience in Vietnam: Sometimes, the paranoia can be worse than the danger. Now that the immediate threat of sniper shootings is behind us, these words are worth attending to:

  Our brain — specifically the reticular formation (so-called “reptile brain”) — is set up to face threats first and only seek opportunities when not threatened. That bias for threat info sells stuff to us. To that end, the media has grabbed and holds our attention, robbing us of the chance to pay attention to something other than the media.