Blue Dogs Whine Instead of Bark

Way more detail about the process than I found elsewhere. I am particularly irked by Blue Dogs who a) run by demonizing the left; b) took way more DCCC money than they raised even though they cow tail to rich business interests and then; c) lost while running AWAY form the accomplishments of the last 2 years calling the thoroughly centrist policies "excessive" and then finally d) blaming Pelosi for their problems.

Just-defeated Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) rose in Tuesday’s caucus meeting to declare that Pelosi is “the face of our defeat.” He told his soon-to-be-former colleagues that “we need new leadership.” ...

Democrats who side with Pelosi are upset with the moderate Blue Dog Democrats, many of whom were the beneficiaries of big spending by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Some of them could hardly have been competitive without the party’s money.


The DCCC spent nearly $60 million on Blue Dogs and centrist New Democrats during the 2010 election cycle, according to federal election reports. Meanwhile, Blue Dogs contributed only $1.9 million of their $9.6 million in dues goals, according to the latest DCCC dues report.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45215.html#ixzz15X6WdYil

Support the DISCLOSE Act

MoveOn.org is pushing a petition for Congress to pass the DISCLOSE Act. If corporations are going to be able to pour money into elections and ballot initiatives, they shouldn't be able to do so anonymously. Now is the time to act, before the 2012 election cycle kicks in.

http://pol.moveon.org/discloseact/

Yesterday's tax cut game

Here's Austan Goolsbee's explanation of the difference between President Obama's and the Republicans' ideas for how to deal with the expiring tax cuts (2 minutes). Republicans are trying to frame it as "raising taxes." President Obama is focused on maintaining all the cuts for lower 95% and going back to something closer to the Clinton-era rates for the top 5% (making over $250,000 per year). Goolsbee's appearance on the Colbert Report helped get this chart to a bigger audience.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/29/white-house-white-board-cea-chair-austan-goolsbee-explains-tax-cut-fight

What's the message?

The message from Election 2010 seems to be "it's still the economy, stupid." Even with the DOW over 11,000 and the threat of a great depression averted, everyone knows that the economy is in trouble and jobs are hard to find. In the exit polls, 9 of 10 cited the economy as the top issue. The argument that the unemployment rate would have been even worse without the Recovery Act never gained any traction. Democrats played defense and never went on the offense with a message about the largest tax cut in history, the end of health insurers being able to dump you when you get sick, targeted tax cuts to small business, etc.

Locally, I thought Trey Casimir had the best summation in today's Daily Item:

“If Chris Carney, who is pro-gun, anti-abortion, a military man, has a positive rating from the NRA, if he can’t get elected around here, nobody with a ‘D’ after their name can get elected around here,” Casimir said.

I would add that Carney did not run a great campaign this time, but the polling averages (see FiveThirtyEight.com) suggested a 6 point Marino win, and it was about a 10 point Marino win. Even if he had run a pitch perfect campaign, he might well have fallen short this time. It was appropriate to raise questions about Marino's past conduct, but the voters wanted to see a focus on the economy and the future, especially in the last couple weeks of the campaign. That never happened, and the charge that Marino was somehow unfit to serve did not sway the voters.

In the "I was wrong" category, it turned out that Joe Sestak made his race with Pat Toomey very close (did those ads showing Toomey with the Chinese flag actually work?), whereas Russ Feingold lost badly to millionaire and political neophyte Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. No one seems to have a good explanation why Feingold slipped so badly after three terms. My only theory was that he did not have the "likeability" factor that can sometimes be the difference. He always seemed a little bit too sure that he was right. Of course, he was also badly outspent and was targeted with unrelenting negative ads. He was favored for reelection until the negative ads drove down his poll numbers.

One other comment: It's going to be difficult to get anything done about a severance tax on natural gas extraction since governor-elect Corbett has dug in against it. But that will be a topic for another day. I read this week that wind turbine companies are laying off people and shutting down production: low natural gas prices have made clean energy too expensive in relative terms. Why am I pretty sure that we are not pricing the real costs of natural gas into the product?

Carney's Votes by the Numbers

One of Tom Marino's very first press releases claimed that Chris Carney "voted with Nancy Pelosi 91% of the time," and I've seen the same claim repeated in NRCC ads on TV. (Of course, this implies that everything Nancy Pelosi votes for is "liberal," but we'll set that aside for a moment.) I said to myself, "That can't be right." Carney has stood up and done the right thing many times (voting for healthcare reform, the DISCLOSE Act, etc.) but I think many liberals and progressives would be a lot happier with him if he really did vote "91% liberally." So I did a little digging.

The first thing I found was this Factcheck.org article which addresses 6 ads being run by the NRCC with basically the same accusation ("voting with Pelosi") against 6 different Democrats. Factcheck points out two reasons the "91%" is wrong and misleading. First of all, it doesn't actually use Pelosi's votes. "Traditionally" (and this was news to me), the Speaker doesn't participate in most of the votes in the House, so for instance out of the 991 votes taken in 2009, Pelosi only cast a vote on 46 of them. So, the NRCC opted instead to assume that any time Carney voted with "the majority of Democrats," he was voting with Pelosi.

The trouble with that (reason #2 why the "91%" is misleading) is that Congress takes many, many votes where a majority of both parties agree. These include quorum calls, votes to name post offices, votes to "honor the 50th anniversary of Miami Dade College" (House Vote #520 in 2010), stuff like that. So if we're really trying to get at a measure of "how consistently does Carney side with the Democrats" (as opposed to siding with everyone), we've got to take that into account.

Factcheck makes the assumption that anything Pelosi actually bothered to vote on must have been a contentious issue, and therefore reports in their article how often (in 2010 only) Carney and Pelosi actually did vote the same (including only the measures that they both actually voted for). They report this number as 84%, which is still pretty high, but the NRCC obviously preferred their (not-quite-accurate) "91%" soundbite.

While Factcheck's assumption is probably true most of the time, it's not necessarily true all the time. In other words, Pelosi may have voted on "non-controversial" things, too. Since we have access to raw Roll Call Vote data from Thomas.loc.gov (or in a more easily usable format at Govtrack.us), I wanted to go a step further than this and see how often Carney really agreed with the Democratic vs. Republican leadership on "controversial" (i.e., non-unanimous) votes over his whole career, not just in 2010. I used two measures to determine which were the "contentious votes":
(1) Any votes that weren't unanimous (the winning side had less than 90% of the vote); or
(2) Any votes where the highest-ranking voting member of each party voted differently.

For (2), since Pelosi doesn't usually vote but her deputy Steny Hoyer (of MD) does, I compared Hoyer's votes with those of John Boehner (the Republican minority leader). Their votes "should" reflect the way that Democrats and Republicans were "supposed to vote" on each measure (I realize this isn't a perfect assumption, but I think it's more objective than Factcheck's).

With all that in mind, I compiled the following table showing how Carney has agreed or disagreed with both parties since he started in Congress in 2007. (Click to enlarge -- I apologize for inserting it as an image, but I was having trouble converting from Excel to HTML.)

Basically, this suggests a few conclusions:
(1) Carney has been pretty consistent under both Bush and Obama;
(2) Carney consistently sides with the Republicans (and breaks with Democrats) between 16-21% of the time. While that's not a huge number, it translates to somewhere between 300 and 400 "controversial" votes with the Republicans (depending on how you define "controversial") or roughly 1 out of every 5 votes. So he's definitely voting with the Democrats more often than not, but he's no mindless drone.

(Final disclaimer: Obviously, none of this addresses which of these votes were "important" bills, or how Carney breaks with the Democrats on certain issues, but it is meant to give an overall picture of his voting tendency.)

I have drafted a letter to the editor that I plan to send to the Daily Item, but if others would like to use this information and send letters on a similar theme, I hope that we could get this information out to combat the "91% voting with Pelosi" myth.

Is there a clean energy future for the US?

Two bits of recommended reading:

First, this piece from Tom Friedman about how we are failing to invest in Energy Secretary Steven Chu's vision of energy innovation--mini-Manhattan projects:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/opinion/13friedman.html

Second, this piece from the Breakthrough Institute that holds up a vision of a post-partisan path forward (which is, of course, already under partisan attack):

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2010/10/postpartisan_power.shtml

We've seen federal action on 2 of CSCC's top 3 issues (Ending the Iraq War and Health Care) in the last couple years. We know we need to do something about energy/environment, but when? How?

Trey Casimir and Erik Viker, 85th District

Trey Casimir did an interview with SQVNEWS recently (less than 10 minutes).

He has stuck to his promise not to solicit donations, and he's only spent about $500 so far.

Here are his top three agenda items:

1. The Thruway
2. Severance tax on natural gas development
3. Close the digital divide (provide more access to high speed internet for those who want it but can't get it).

Trey is running an unorthodox campaign, to say the least. It will be interesting to see how many Republicans vote for someone other than the Republican this time around.

I suspect that Fred Keller will get fewer votes than Russ Fairchild did last time around and that Erik Viker will get some of those. See his SQVNEWS interview here. Like Trey, he says he's using no Harrisburg consultants and running a grassroots campaign and that he wants to get beyond the broken political party system. Seems like there's a consensus about getting rid of the "walking around money" too.

As far as I know, Fred Keller hasn't done a similar interview. Feel free to post information in the comments if you are aware of any.