Election 2008

I know, I know, my ongoing beef with Alice Rivlin is starting to get as long in the tooth as the now-settled one between Nas and Jay-Z, but I just realized that I forget to mention her quote in that awful and error-plauged article on the budget in last Saturday's WaPo:

"I suspect that McCain will be more constrained and will have a veto power over the Democratic Congress," said Alice M. Rivlin, who served as the first director of the Congressional Budget Office, as well as one of Clinton's budget directors. "If it's Obama, the Democratic Congress is going to be pushing for spending and it's awfully hard to rein in your own folks. No Democrat is going to want to go to war with Congress."

The Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center estimates that the McCain tax proposal would increase the national debt by a trillion more dollars over the next 10 years than Obama's plan. Some constraint.

In a thoughtful TPM Cafe post, Theda Skocpol argues that despite Obama's current lead, McCain is actually doing a better job of shaping the agenda:

Why isn't Obama getting his economic message across with a few bold symbolic gestures -- eyecatching programs (not necessarily really new) that he uses to feature what he proposes on gas prices, college access, family leave, etc? This whole area needs much more thought. The elite media find it boring and irrelevant to talk about the huge distributional consequences of an election like this—after all, most of them are rich and spend time talking to other rich folks and insider "analysts"—yet ordinary voters have to be able to wrap their minds around specific examples of what Obama and Demcorats can do to make life better. It up to Democrats to use eye-catching moves and message discipline (lots of surrogates at once) to get specific messages through on the economy. So far, little effectiveness here, yet this is what Democrats should have going for them in this election!

....

Creative thinking about better agenda-control needs to happen now, in his campaign, in the DNC, and in the Congressional leadership. Too much attention is focused on fighting the last war, preparing to avoid the Swift-boating-type attacks Kerry lost in August 2004, rather than on shaping this war, which is a new one on different but equally tough terrain! This election is an agenda-shaping war to focus on real-life economic concerns and convince ordinary voters that Obama and the Democrats CAN make a difference for them. If they don't believe that, voters, especially older ones, will take the safe course and install McCain for a while.

My former chief, CBPP's Bob Greenstein, has an impassioned defense of his former employee Jason Furman at the Huffington Post. Bob rightly skewers some of the reporting on Furman—particularly an erroneous report that he favored Social Security privatization.

I do have to gently disagree, however, with a two of Bob's arguments. First, he states that:

Everyone involved in the 2005 debate over Bush's privatization proposal knows it was Furman's devastating analyses shredding the Bush plan and skewering the arguments of privatizers that formed the intellectual core of the successful opposition. Democratic Members of Congress, unions, and grassroots campaigns against the Bush plan built much of their critiques on Furman's work.

The suggestion that "everyone involved" in the SS debate "knows it was Furman's" work that "formed the intellectual core of the successful opposition" is a bit of an overstatement. (Also, while saying "I'm the greatest rapper alive" is standard in hip-hop, it's somewhat out of place in policy analysis). Furman's work on SS at CBPP was great, but it was only part of a larger Team Progressive effort that formed the "intellectual core" of the defense. Ezra Klein is closer to the mark when he notes that Furman:

... was a staunch ally during the Social Security privatization fight, and did as much as any economist not named Dean Baker to push back on the then-pervasive idea that Social Security was in crisis and required conservative reform.

Second, Bob suggests that Furman's hire doesn't necessarily represent a "move to the political center":

.... several news accounts, including a Huffington Post column, portrayed Obama's hiring of Furman as a move to the political center now that Obama has wrapped up the nomination. This, too, is dubious. Prior to Furman's hiring, Obama's two top advisers on economic and fiscal policy were University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee and Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman. Goolsbee, Liebman, and Furman are all moderately left of center. In fact, reading the work of all three (each of whom is considered a top-notch economists) leads one to put Furman modestly to the left, not the right, of the other two. In recent years, Furman's work has focused, in particular, on how to change government policies so the gains of economic growth are more evenly shared, with more gains going to low—and moderate—income working families and fewer to corporate profits than has recently occurred.

While it may be true that Furman is modestly to the left of Goolsbee and Liebman (the distinction isn't clear to me based on their written work), the real divide here involves Furman's views on fiscal policy as well as the role of economic institutions—particularly collective bargaining, new basic labor standards like paid leave, and other forms of market regulation—in creating an economy that works for all Americans.

Obama doesn't exactly have a boldly progressive economic agenda, but it includes many progressive elements—such as paid sick days and leave, indexing (not just increasing) the minimum wage, and expanding collective bargaining—that Furman, as far as I can tell, has never publicly endorsed. In my view, the biggest problem with Furman's infamous Wal-Mart paper is precisely his failure to include these reforms, as well as universal health care, as recommendations to "change government policies so the gains of economic growth are more evenly shared." In a subsequent online debate with Barbara Ehrenreich, he had a perfect opportunity to correct this imbalance, but failed to do so—instead, again quoting Ezra Klein, riding his initial argument "to a level of dogmatism that appears unwise."

Greenstein's case for Furman would actually have been strengthened if he had acknowledged the obvious: Furman is pretty much a 1990s-style "third way" guy with the pros and cons that ideology entails. Among the pros, Furman supports the current welfare state and would increase government transfers to low- and moderate-income folks: the cons, he wouldn't require much more from corporate American (other than an increase in the minimum wage). Moreover, he hasn't publicly made the same moves to the left as some others in the Rubin camp. Importantly, Obama is already on record supporting many of the key elements of a progressive economic agenda, one that does require more from business. It's our job to make sure he holds to those positions whoever his advisers may be.

Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer, argue in today's WaPo that "the party faithful agree on the basic outlines of a new social contract" for a post-industrial society:

....

The new agenda focuses on protecting middle-class families from the insecurities of the global economy. In their primary campaigns, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton advocated proposals to help citizens whose economic welfare has been threatened by the rising costs of health care and education, the slide in the housing and stock markets, the challenges of retirement, and global warming.

Obama speaks of strengthening families by putting "the rungs back on that ladder to the middle class," giving "every family the chance that so many of our parents and grandparents had." He calls for a tax credit to offset the Social Security tax and expanding the earned-income tax credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Obama also favors two big programs that no Democrat before him could realize: a national health plan that would cut costs and cover every citizen; and a sizable tuition grant to college students who sign up for national service.

The emphasis on protecting middle-class families reflects a major historical shift. During the 1930s and '40s, liberals struggled to create a vibrant middle class out of the industrial wage-earners who had immigrated to the United States and rural people of all races who lacked electricity and jobs. New Deal programs focused on workingmen and depressed regions. The National Labor Relations Act legitimized unions and boosted the purchasing power of the working class. The Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority enabled Southern communities to participate fully in the modern manufacturing economy. Social Security gave support to the elderly, lessening the burden on their children. The GI Bill gave a generation the ability to purchase a home and get a college education.

In the 1960s, Democrats turned to expanding the middle class. John F. Kennedy and LBJ sought to increase the number of Americans who could enjoy the economic and social benefits of a booming economy. The rights revolution made it possible for African Americans, Latinos and women from all backgrounds to compete for most of the same jobs as white men. Medicare and Medicaid provided new health benefits for the elderly and the poor.

Now, Democrats are grappling with insecurities faced by entire families, that institution conservatives always claim to represent. The past three decades have produced growing economic inequality and a shrinking middle class. Younger Americans no longer expect to enjoy as good a life as their parents did. Wage-earners fear for the future of their jobs and incomes. No family is secure.

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Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, wrote a great history of the language of populism, The Populist Persuasion, back in the 1990s. His nuanced conclusion in that book is worth revisiting:

.... [Populism's] assertion of resentments based on class and status may be a barrier to constructing a new type of universalism—what the eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin calls "the ability to voice broadly human concerns." .... Yet the desire to transcend populism is also shortsighted. It ignores the very persistence of the language, rooted in the gap between American ideals and those institutions and authorities whose performance betrays them. That continuity occurs for a good reason. At the core of the populist tradition is an insight of great democratic and moral significance. No major problem can be seriously addressed, much less nudged on a path toward solution, unless what an antebellum politician called the "productive and burden-bearing classes"—Americans of all races who work for a living, knit neighborhoods together, and cherish what the nation is supposed to stand for—participate in the task ....

To move any closer toward redistributing wealth and revitalizing mass democracy, intellectuals have to take part in social movements that knit such people together. Without silencing the spirited voices of gender and racial community that emerged from the 1960s, we have to help chisel away the hardened self-righteousness that has grown up around such identities. Otherwise we risk spending the future as spectators to the endless competition between spindoctors and copywriters, captives to anyone who seems to make the old rhetoric sing again, if only for one acceptance speech or third-second spot. Such passivity is a cultural disease, and some form of populism is needed to cure it.

When a new breed of inclusive grassroots movements does arise, intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice. They should work to stress the harmonious, hopeful, and pragmatic aspects of populist language and to disparage the meaner ones—without forgetting that evangelical zeal cannot be expunged from our culture. Like the American dream itself, populism lives too deeply in the fears and expectations of American citizens to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but, without it, we are lost.

Some concrete examples of the effects of the McCain and Obama tax plans, from modeling by the Tax Policy Center:

A single mom, with one child, making $15,000-a-year (in adjusted gross income) would get a $17 tax cut from the McCain plan, but see a $500 reduction from Obama, thanks to his new work credit.

A newly-married young couple with no kids, making a combined income of $50,000, would get a $36 tax cut from McCain, but a tax reduction of about $1000 from Obama. The big difference again: Obama’s work credit.

By contrast, think about the classic suburban 1950s sitcom family, with two kids but only one wage earner, who makes $75,000. Ward and June Cleaver would do a bit better under McCain, who would cut their taxes by $800, while Obama would trim their taxes by only about $500. McCain’s increased dependent exemption for Wally and the Beave trumps Obama’s work credit.

Now, let’s look at a two-lawyer family, making $200,000, with one child. McCain would give them a tax cut of roughly $7000, while Obama would trim their taxes by about $5000. The big reason: each candidate would patch the Alternative Minimum Tax.

A married baseball player who takes home $2 million and has one child might want to go to bat for McCain, who would give him a tax cut of more than $30,000. Obama would raise his taxes by $135,000.

For seniors, the pattern is a bit more surprising, since Obama has been touting his tax cuts for the elderly. Obama would give an unmarried senior making $35,000 a tax cut of $3000, which would wipe out her tax bill. McCain would give her a tax cut of about $250.

Brad DeLong adds on to the critique of Perry Bacon Jr's abysmal WaPo story on the differences between Obamanomics and McCainonomics:

....

To establish tax credits for health insurance requires the creation of a bureaucracy to assess and monitor health insurance plans—somebody has to decide purchase of which health insurance plans qualifies one for the tax credit, and which does not. Regulation via tax expenditures and a bureaucracy to define and monitor them is regulation—a point that eludes Perry Bacon Jr. His example of how McCain is for reducing regulation—well, that dog just won't hunt. And as for job creation—covering the uninsured definitely creates health-care jobs; tax credits to persuade people who almost all already receive employer-sponsored insurance to switch to catastrophic-only coverage is not and is not intended to be a job-creation measure. But Perry Bacon doesn't seem to realize this.

Nor does Bacon appear to realize that a government that spends through tax expenditure creates as many potential distortions as a government that spends through, well, spending—that is why they are called tax expenditures, after all.

....

Uchitelle in the NYT, Borosage, and, my favorite, Dean Baker on why Obama (wisely) didn't pick a crazy-ass progressive economist like say, Dean Baker.

The reality is that if Obama had picked a progressive economist (a.k.a. a Neanderthal protectionist), who had not been initiated into the Wall Street club, he would have gotten beaten up so badly by the media that he would want Reverend Wright to come back for more press events.

There's also supposedly a video of Baker floating around in which he exclaims, in his prophetic voice: "God bless American capitalism? No, God damn American capitalism!"

Furman argues in Uchitelle's article that his own views are "irrelevant.” But that strikes me as spin—the blow-up around Furman's appointment will help keep him fair and balanced, but based on his writing and quotes, he's a true believer in Rubinomics, and it's inevitable that those views will influence the advice he gives.

Baker is probably right about how a progressive economist would have been treated by the media, and Borosage is right when he says Furmangate really isn't about Furman, it's about Obama's economic views. But I'd still love to see an economist from the non-Rubinite camp on Obama's staff alongside Furman. And to be even more super-duper-radical, how about a woman on either the paid staff or unpaid economic advisor list (right now the same list of roughly five white guys is regularly cited). My top pick for either would be Heather Boushey, who's currently working for the Joint Economic Committee on the hill, has as much or more policy savvy as Furman, and knows way more about labor market economics, which I hear just might be an issue in this election, than he does.

According to yesterday's WaPo, one of the "starker contrasts" in this year's presidential election is "between McCain's emphasis on job creation and reducing regulation and Obama's focus on immediately easing financial problems."

Right.

Here's Dean Baker's response:

While Obama has certainly made a point of crafting policies that are intended to ease the financial problems of low and moderate income families, most notably providing universal health care, it would be difficult to characterize Senator McCain's agenda as focusing on job creation.

Senator McCain's economic proposals center on maintaining the tax cuts put in place under the Bush administration. The economy has sustained the slowest pace of job creation on record during the Bush years, creating jobs at annual rate of just over 700,000 a year (0.5 percent). By contrast, it created jobs at almost a 3 million annual rate during the Clinton years.

It would be wrong to attribute the entire falloff in the pace of job creation between the Clinton and Bush administrations to President Bush's tax cuts, but it would be difficult to argue that an economic policy that centers on maintaining these tax cuts has a "emphasis on job creation" as the Post told readers.

See also, Krugman.

I generally subscribe to the relatively positive progressive view of Obamanomics, but today's announcement that Rubinista Jason Furman is joining the Obama team as their economic policy director does give me pause. At TPM Cafe, Steve Clemons notes:

Furman manifests the interests and perspective of perhaps the leading neoliberal force in politics today, Robert Rubin. Furman could make a good case that his views may differ here and there, but my sense is that he's an essential spear-carrier of Rubinomics.

.... it's clear that Furman is no Dean Baker or Robert Blecker or Jared Bernstein—all important economists who have been far more right as of late than the Rubin crowd in anticipating the stress points in globalization, the housing bubble, trade, and the like.

You can say that again. After Circuit City laid off more than 3,000 workers because they were "paid too much"—between $10 and $20 an hour—Furman had this to say to the NYT's David Leonhardt:

The flexibility of the American labor force seems to be one reason that recessions have become less frequent and unemployment is less of a problem here than in Europe, notes Jason Furman, a leading Democratic economist. In this country, fast-growing companies can hire new workers without worrying that they are making a 30-year commitment.

While this is a good rehash of what had been the orthodox view on Europe, it was comprehensively dismantled in an important 2006 paper by David Howell, Dean Baker Andrew Glyn and John Schmitt.

In the popular press and in a surprising number of professional papers, “Europe” is often portrayed as a single entity characterized by high unemployment and strong social protections, in contrast to the much better performing and relatively unregulated labor markets of the U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon economies. This conventional view greatly misrepresents the facts.

Howell and Co. found "little evidence to suggest that changes in the strength of these protective labor market institutions can explain either the success of the [countries in Europe touted as economic] “success stories” or the continued high unemployment of the four large continental European countries."

And here's Furman in Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story, a paper he wrote in 2005:

... Wal-Mart is a progressive success story. By acting in the interests of its shareholders, Wal-Mart has innovated and expanded competition, resulting in huge benefits for the American middle class and even proportionately
larger benefits for moderate-income Americans.

....

... the “Wal-Mart economy” is not about an economy in which corporations are squeezing workers. It’s about an economy in which the return to skills is rapidly growing, and technological change, among other forces, is leading to increased inequality. ....

Let's hope Furman doesn't still hold this view about inequality—a conventional one that a growing number of mainstream economists see as outdated. (For an example of economists who held the conventional view, but now place more emphasis on the role of economic institutions like unions, see this paper by MIT's Frank Levy and Peter Temin.)

To be fair, Furman did important defensive work that helped beat back the conservative plan to privatize social security, and he, like Rubin, believes that we need a strong system of social insurance. I'd just like to see some indication that he'll fight as hard inside the campaign (and a potential Obama Administration) for policy changes that restore and build the kind of institutions, like unions and universal health care, that are needed to strengthen and expand the middle class in today's economy—and, just as importantly, places a higher priority on achieving these improvements than on deficit reduction.

What Obama needs is a unity ticket in the economic policy department—an economics advisor on the paid campaign staff at the same level as Furman who represents the progressive economic policy wing that, as Clemons put it, "has been far more right of late." Now that would be some change I can believe in.

Update: Also worth reading on this topic, Todd Tucker, Ezra Klein, and the Nation's Chris Hayes. Hayes, who was on a conference call with Furman, paraphrases Furman as saying "Obama's economic plan is much more focused on tax cuts than investment." Tucker notes, correctly, that some of the other mainstreamers mentioned as unpaid advisors, like Alan Blinder, have become more progressive on some issues, like trade, as of late. Finally, Ezra Klein is positive, explaining:

... I think this is a good move for Obama. Jason has the political skills and policy contacts to run an effective economic shop. But if the question is why Obama didn't hire a more progressive economist like Dean Baker or Jared Bernstein or Joseph Stiglitz, the answer seems pretty simple: Despite some primary pandering in Ohio, Obama isn't that progressive on economic issues.

Returning home from a month of traveling, mostly overseas, I find myself with a sense of, to borrow from Yankees' great Yogi Berra, "deja-vu all over again." When I left, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was in Raleigh celebrating his victory in the state's primary, and today, he is back in Raleigh to give an invitation-only talk about economic issues. The difference is that Obama now is is the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee.

The news that Obama is coming back to North Carolina has triggered all sorts of comments and analysis focused on the electoral wisdom of his visit. Why would he visit a state that hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976? Does this mean that U.S. Sen. John McCain is weak? Is this part of some grand electoral plan?

Yet this horse-race analysis overlooks just how dysfunctional American presidential politics has become. Why should the fact that a presidential candidate is visiting one of the nation's most-populous states news in and of itself?

Regardless of the outcome in November, the presence of Obama in North Carolina (hopefully this will not be his only visit) is a good thing. Ideally, Obama's economic speech today will expose voters, both those who attend in person and those who learn about it through media outlets, to a progressive economic vision that normally isn't raised in North Carolina. And even if North Carolina ultimately backs McCain (a very probable outcome), multiple appearances -- both in person and through ads -- on the part of Obama could help set changes in motion that would alter the dynamics of future elections, just as has happened in neighboring Virginia. If Obama has the resources to invest in a "red" state like North Carolina, why should he pass up on an opportunity to help widen the playing field for progressive politics?

A couple of months ago, my hometown pride swelled as the extra long primary season took candidates into parts of the country like my home Kentucky that rarely figure into national politics. But after Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama in Kentucky and West Virgina and some 20 percent of white WV voters said race was a factor in their vote, I heard quips about from East Coast & "liberal" friends, acquaintances and "fr-enemies" that ranged from ridicule to vitriol about the "backwater's" 15 minutes of fame. There has been a "discovery of the other among us"—the white working class (WWC)—as I get to hear any number of jokes about incest and hicks. Some politicos are choosing to pathologize the WWC, while some suggest than even the whiteys know not the full depth of backwardness that is within them. (And, btw, all the candidates need to leave the amateur sociology to the pros.)

Some of the more sophisticated analysts have taken to asking whether the WWC is even needed for electoral purposes anymore. Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira have written a paper entitled The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class. This is a useful companion piece to America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, Ruy's 2000 book with Joel Rogers. They look at the work of Larry Bartels and Thomas Frank, and offer some commentary on an emerging GOP strategy to attract WWC voters authored by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Among the main findings of the more recent paper:

• There are many different ways to define working class. By a high school educational standard, the white working class" (WWC) has declined from 86% of the population in 1940 to 48% of the population in 2007. By a higher education standard, the WWC has declined from 82% to 29%.
• By a broad occupational index, the WWC has declined from 74 to 43%; by a narrower occupational index, the change has been 58 to 25%.
• By an income standard, the change has been 86% to 33%.

In short, by the absolute benchmarks used in the paper, white people have been on the move. The implication is that candidates, while they cannot ignore the WWC, do not need them as much as they used to. Messages and policies should be crafted to target some coalition of the poor, minorities, and richer whites, including, in Alan and Ruy's terms, more "aspirational" rather than "downtrodden" whites.

But the analysis ain't perfect. One problem is that Alan and Ruy do not take into account relative benchmarks, particularly skyrocketing income inequality. According to the leading analysis by Piketty and Saez, the richest 10 percent of Americans are taking nearly half of the economic pie, while the top 1 percent is taking over a sixth. Wealthy individuals' share of national income was stable for the first several decades after World War II, but shot up 50 percent for the richest 10 percent and 150 percent for the richest 1 percent between 1973 and 2006. These trends are bound to affect workers' attitudes, whether they work for a steel mill or an Internet startup.

Another problem has to do with causality. That the WWC didn't vote for Democrats from Hubert Humphrey to John Kerry may say more about candidates like Kerry than about the WWC's inherent political orientation. Without a control group of populist candidates, it is impossible to know how people might have voted.

Finally, Americans have likely always been both aspirational and downtrodden. But since pollsters did not employ these survey frames from the 1940s onward, it is impossible to know if Americans of any race or class are becoming less responsive to political messages that are more invested with conflict and resentment.

And for my money, the brouhaha is not over the white working class but over the working class. Parts of the Democratic Party have been searching for ways for decades to not have to deal with class, and have typically combined some outreach to the wealthy on the basis of their wealth, and other groups on the basis of their identity. Subtract these groups, and you're left with the WWC, which, yes, happens to be white, but its exclusion from the foregoing electoral schema is primarily on the basis of its class. So appealing to working class folks of any race on the basis of their class gets lost.

As we've shown elsewhere, there is more than an ample basis to construct a national project on the basis of our shared interests as consumers and workers. Not only might that be the right thing to do, but it can also be the electorally smart thing to do.

(This guest post by Todd Tucker was originally posted at Eyes on Trade, the blog of Global Trade Watch. The Editors.)

We seek change and see it, say the yellow bells of Iowa.
Not too fast, stay, we ask, cried the sirens of New Hampshire.
Ding dong ding dong, sang the indecisive bells on Tuesday.
Change be our song now, rang out the next ten bells.
Even we stand ready, punctuated the Potomac.
Then a slip of the lip amid the hip, bitter-sweet drip-drip...
And god-dang clang, the pastor sang.
Yes, we cling, confirmed the suffering bells of PA.
But we long since overcame, claimed the belles of Carolina.
Now we await the lady for to sing.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, tho perhaps not until June.

Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, is full of fascinating insights into the politics of inequality. I hope to do a longer post on the book at some point, but until then, wanted to share one of Bartels' conclusions:

Scholars of political participation and liberal activists often seem to suppose that the cure for political inequality is to educate and mobilize the disadvantaged in support of specific progressive policies. However, the evidence of unresponsiveness to the views of low-income citizens presented in chapter 9 [of Bartel's book] and in [Martin] Gilen's work suggests that that strategy is very unlikely to be politically effective. ....

If "voice" is "likely to be futile" for people on the losing end of economic inequality, is there any hope for progress? My analysis points to two related bright spots in an otherwise gloomy picture. First, the correlation between class positions and political views is not so substantial that support for egalitarian policies is limited to "those mired in poverty." ....

[Second], my analyses suggest that the specific policy views of citizens, whether rich or poor, have less impact in the policy-making process than the ideological convictions of elected officials. .... policy choices seem to depend more on the partisan ideologies of key policy makers than on the details of public opinion. Thus, even if poor people have negligible direct influence on the day-to-day decisions of elected officials, they--and their ideological allies--may have substantial indirect influence by altering the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in the making of public policy.

In essence, reducing poverty and inequality will require more progressives in positions of power. Yet, modern-day anti-poverty advocacy is largely legislative advocacy, advocacy conducted by groups funded by non-partisan and mostly non-ideological foundations. As political scientist Andrew Rich has noted:

... the leaders of liberal think tanks are often preoccupied by deeply held commitments to producing objective research, on the one hand, and to connecting their work to issue-based grassroots activism, on the other hand. These commitments are compatible with the tenets of liberal ideology, but they are far less helpful to fighting a war of ideas.

This dominant liberal approach has met with limited success over the last few decades. Bartels' research helps to explain why.

I really like Matt's "transcendent enemy" formula. Some nominations for that role: 1) "Wall Street predators", from last night's Obama speech; and 2) the "superclass", from David Rothkopf's new book, or some variation on it. The extremely wealthy or corporate CEO or similar categories by themselves aren't sufficient as transcendent enemies—it's the nexus of wealth, power, and actions driven by conservative ideology that needs to be the target.

Just in time for the North Carolina primary, a nice op-ed in the News and Observer (NC) by CEPR's Dean Baker and John Quinterno of the North Carolina Justice Center. One of the things I like is how it makes low-wage work part of a larger story about the economy:

....

Regardless of whether the nation technically is in a recession, working families most definitely are. Since the 2001 recession, North Carolina has lost, on balance, more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs, a traditional source of living-wage employment for individuals without post-secondary degrees.

This has occurred alongside rapid growth in the low-wage labor market. Less than one out of every four jobs in North Carolina pays more than $17 an hour and offers both employer-provided health and retirement benefits, according to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The loss of good jobs means that many workers in North Carolina are paid too little to make ends meet. A recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the N.C. Budget & Tax Center found that 24 percent of North Carolinians in working families earned too little to afford the market prices of a bundle of basic goods and services. Although public programs designed to help workers in low-paid jobs, such as subsidized child-care, helped close the gap for about one-sixth of the people in this group, most low-wage workers still came up short.

Our next president will have to address both the immediate problems stemming from the recession and the longer-term problems associated with the loss of good jobs. Ideally, the policies that combat the recession in the short term could also help counteract the larger problem of low-wage work.

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