Is Personnel Policy?

By Christopher Hayes

Yglesias (via his cronies at CAP) reports that Melody Barnes will run Obama's Domestic Policy Council.

That's good news. I think she counts as a "dyed-in-the-wool progressive."

On a related note, there's been a fair amount of back and forth about my complaint the other day w/r/t the lack of movement lefties in the nascent Obama administration.

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November 24, 2008

Ain't No Love In the Heart of the Citi

By Christopher Hayes

Lots of bailout news today, which is never a very good sign. Mark Thoma rounds up the opinions on it here and I'm still digesting, but my sense is that, as Krugman says it's "a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more." Atrios in his inimitable way calls it simply a "sh*t sandwich."

It's really remarkable the way everything is coming together. While Citi goes to the government hat in hand, we have a long "Reckoning" article in the Times about how Citi got to where it is, pinning at least some of the blame on one Bob Rubin, who pushed to take on more risk and more leverage in pursuit of higher profits. And then we have this article about how -- surprise! -- most, if not all of Barack Obama's economic team are Rubin acolytes.

You got to tip your hat to Rubin. The guy's like the Ahmed Chalabi of economic policy.

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November 24, 2008

Left Out

By Christopher Hayes

I've been trying to avoid commenting on specific personnel for the Obama administration, because it's hard to know what's real and what's rumor, and because it's also difficult to get my head around what the proper evaluative criteria is. The federal bureaucracy is inordinately complicated and there may be reasons to put certain people in certain positions that has nothing to do with their ideological bona fides. That said, I pretty much agree with Chris Bowers:

I know everyone is obsessed with the "team of rivals" idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated. Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.

Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one. Remember this is the movement that was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care. And I don't just mean in that in a sectarian way. I mean to say that the emerging establishment consensus on all of these issues came from the left. There's tons of things the left is right about that aren't even close to mainstream (taking a hatchet to the national security state and ending the prison industrial complex to name just two), but hopefully we're moving there.

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November 21, 2008

The New Senate

By Christopher Hayes

The NY Times is reporting that Hillary Clinton will accept the job of Secretary of State. I don't have much to say, except that I've always thought it was a very strange pick, considering two of the most substantive disagreements between the two candidates during the primary were on the war in Iraq and direct negotiations with hostile foreign nations. I think Obama was right about both, Clinton was wrong about both and so choosing her to implement his foreign policy seems bizarre. Spencer Ackerman has a more fleshed out, reported piece about these concerns here.

That said, I think one angle that hasn't gotten much attention is the massive change that's coming to the US Senate. As far as I can tell there are going to be at least thirteen new Senators come January. (As of know, seven newly elected Democrats, three new Republicans and three replacements for Obama, Biden and Clinton, respectively.) It's possible there will be more, if Franken wins the recount and Martin the run-off, or if Obama appoints any other senators to cabinet posts.

The Senate is as sclerotic an institution as exists in American life, so a 13% turnover in a single year amounts to a complete upheaval. Then there's the added fact that two of, if not the two most powerful and respected Democratic legislators, Robert Byrd and Teddy Kennedy are both in precarious physical shape. I'm not quite sure yet what this means for Obama's legislative agenda, though my gut sense is that it will help him, particularly with fewer entrenched senatorial barons exacting tolls. Either way, it's going to be very interesting to watch.

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November 21, 2008

Criteria for Treasury

By Christopher Hayes

One of the weird things about the transition period is that all of the speculation and editorializing tends to revolve around the actual personnel being floated or rumored as opposed to a broader discussion of what qualities characteristics and resume one would want to see in the various posts. So here's an op-ed I wrote trying to sketch out my thoughts on the main criteria for Treasury:

Starting with the very first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the office has, traditionally been held by a denizen of Wall Street. But at this moment, whatever the benefits of hands-on experience with finance brings, it comes at high cost: a tendency to believe that what's best for Wall Street is necessarily best for the country as a whole.

But the inescapable fact is that the interests of taxpayers and Wall Street firms will often be in direct conflict, and we need someone at Treasury whom we can trust to represent the former over the latter.

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November 19, 2008

You Go To Crisis With The Government You Have

By Christopher Hayes

My Swiss-junket-mate, Matt Yglesias makes a good point about the distance between the abstract ideal policy vis a vis GM and the auto-industry and the real-world one we're likely to get. This dovetails with the point I was trying to make in an earlier post, which is, more or less that though we're in a moment of what I tentatively believe to be fairly massive change in the operating ideology of the American federal government, we're equipped with a government that is, thanks largely to preceding dominant ideology hostile to its very existence, desperately ill-equipped to competently manage and execute something like, say, large-scale industrial management.

Now, a large part of the reason for this is that the conservative/libertarian critique of government is to a degree self-fulfilling, gut the public sector, create a degraded, corrupt, transactional economy of influence and crony capitalism and all of the most dystopian right-wing visions of the efficacy of government compared to the market look alarmingly true.

But I'm squarely in the camp that believes we need some fairly large scale changes in the relationship between the state and the market, much of forced by the magnitude of the crisis we now face. One of the major challenges, perhaps, in some senses, the major challenge for the Obama administration will be building a federal government capable and worthy of dispensing the many new responsibilities it will inherit.

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November 17, 2008

Socialism With a Withered State

By Christopher Hayes

Apologies for the week-long hiatus. I was on a trip in Switzerland (about which more in a bit) and trying amidst a heavy schedule to pay attention to developments back at home. Seems like the central news is the emerging debate over a GM/automaker bailout. I'm far from expert in these matters and still puzzling through the details, but Felix Salmon's comments on the false dichotomy of bailout v bankruptcy seem sensible.

But there's a broader point to make here: we're in totally uncharted waters right now. We've witnessed the intellectual collapse of the old neo-liberal orthodoxy, and yet its advocates retain tremendous real-world political, intellectual and elite influence. The public's attitudes towards state intervention have grown generally more friendly, but figuring out where the public is ideologically is a very tricky business. And on top of this we have this rolling crisis, which demands, or seems to demand consistent intervention, ideology be damned.

In this environment, we're seeing a lot of very ad-hoc policy-making, a case by case government intervention. I'm not sure what the massive wholistic alternative to this is, but it seems to be that we've now got a mismatch between the capacities of our deeply stripped down, subcontracted federal government, and the requirements of the moment. Amidst all the talk of the Bush Administration's penchant for increasing the size of the state, the measure invoked is the size of the federal budget as a percentage of GDP, which has indeed grown. But starting in the early Clinton years, the federal civilian workforce has shrunk [PDF]. Contractors make up the gap.

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November 17, 2008

Mr. President, May I Suggest A Book

By Christopher Hayes

Scott McLemee wrote a fantastic column in which he emailed a number of journalists, thinkers, and intellectuals and asked them what book they would have Barack Obama read if it could only be one.

Some of the suggestions:

Elvin Lim: The president-elect should read Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt (AEI Press, 2000), edited by Charles O. Jones. Richard Neustadt was a scholar-practitioner who advised Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton, and, until his passing in 2003, also the dean of presidential studies. Most of the memos in this volume were written for president-elect John Kennedy, when the country was, as it is now, ready for change.

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November 11, 2008

The Occam's Razor Explanation

By Christopher Hayes

I'm working on a longer set of reflections on this remarkable election and its remarkable outcome. Sometimes as writer you can feel outclassed by the events you have to chronicle, and that's how I've been feeling the last two days. Such a moment calls for a Henry David Thoreau, or an Ida B. Wells. We work-a-day political reporters don't quite seem up to the task.

But two quick thoughts. One, the work of democracy never ends. I spent election night with much of the Obama campaign field staff of Virginia. When the networks called Virginia for Obama at 10:50pm everyone erupted into joy, and then ten minutes later the place went absolutely nuts when Obama was elected president. By 11:30 the entire staff was on an all-staff conference call getting their assignments for the next day. With two very close congressional races yet to be resolved in the state, the organizers would have to be up early the next day to start monitoring the count. The dedication exhibited by the hundreds of Obama organizers who've worked for this campaign (my brother among them) is just awe-inspiring.

Two, there'll be lots of explanations of why Obama won, but for my money the best analysis so far comes from political scientist Andrew Gelman. He's run lots of the data, and one of the most interesting results he's found is that there was a more-or-less uniform partisan swing towards the Democrats across the country of about 3 percent. While it might be the most unsatisfying explanation of a monumentally dramatic and riveting election, I think the single best explanation of what happened was this: the Republican party ran the economy into the ground, and independents trust the Democratic party to vouchsafe their economic interests more than they trust the Republicans.

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November 6, 2008

Tracking Voter Problems: Part Three

By Christopher Hayes

WASHINGTON, DC -- From Nation intern Emma Dumain, comes the final dispatch from the Election Protection command center:

In the second press briefing of the day here at the Election Protection command center in Washington, members of the media were greeted with more doleful assessments of the state of voter rights in America. Text messages, false e-mails and Facebook wall posts have been circulating with the same "clarification" as seen on the Hampton Roads, Virginia fliers: "Obama voters, vote on November 5." Overflow ballots are being piled on floors in precincts around Florida after hours of malfunctioning optical scanners. Students at Virginia Tech are being sent to vote at a precinct only reachable by car, on an unmarked road.

"Our American voting system is broken," said Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director of the Laywers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, at the start of the briefing. "We must take action now. We can't wake up tomorrow when the question on our minds is, 'who won and who lost?' We need to ask, 'how do we go forward as a nation to the next election with a better election system?'"

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November 4, 2008