Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tim Reid, 69.

I keep thinking that some blogging will happen, but it doesn't seem to be (here; regular posts at PP all week). With any luck, this won't be the third day in a row with only the good stuff:

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, always.

2. Good analysis from Greg Sargent on Obama, John Podesta, and executive action on climate. One additional point: a normal opposition party would consider, given the possibility of significant action, cutting a deal to protect party-aligned interest groups as much as possible (while, perhaps, securing some other policy gains in return). That's essentially the story, for example of Bush's early administration education initiative. It might not end that way; the administration could reject a deal that the out-party was willing to make, or the out-party might ultimately decide that the substantive changes they could purchase wouldn't be worth it. But at any rate, with the current GOP, it's just a non-starter.

3. Brad DeLong, over at his new digs, brings us Christina Romer and more on Bernanke.

4. Stan Collender on Paul Ryan.

Sunday Question for Liberals

On climate: compared with election day 2008, more optimistic or more pessimistic? Do you think it's because your expectations were too high (or too low) back then, or do you think your expectations were reasonable at the time?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jose Barrios, 56. No, you don't remember him -- just a very short cup of coffee, in 1982 -- but I do: three years with the Phoenix Giants.

Good stuff:

1. If you've read my various defenses of John Boehner (and for those who haven't: I think he's a pretty good Speaker in a very difficult situation), you should probably read Stan Collender, who has a very different point of view on Boehner.

2. Here's David Roberts on the Obama climate initiative.

3. And Scott Lemieux on Chief Justice Roberts and the Voting Rights case.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Laurel Holloman, 42.

Right to the good stuff:

1. Seth Masket has a quick note on quality challengers.

2. Jonathan Chait on Josh Barro...and on climate, the DC Circuit, and filibusters.

3. Sarah Kliff on the fluoridation wars, before Portland clobbered a fluoride vote.

4. And Kevin Collins tweets something very sensible: "Presidential elections are the least common type of contest, so be wary of general conclusions about US electoral politics drawn from them."

More on Talk and Action and Agenda Setting and Climate

I wrote one over at Plum Line yesterday about a Media Matters push to get people to lobby the broadcast networks to run more stories about climate. My argument was that it's unlikely that such an effort would be successful, and that if the goal was more attention to climate, the more likely way to get results would be for activists to target politicians, and especially the president. Basically, the path going activists to parties to politicians to news coverage works better than the more direct activists to news coverage path.

After some pushback, I'm thinking that it wasn't the smartest item I ever wrote. Not that I got it wrong, exactly, but just that my focus on the narrow question wasn't really very helpful. So, I'm going with a long, rambling post that considers the more general issue from several different perspectives.

First, I agree with what Michael Grunwald tweeted: "Deeds>Words!" Along with a link to his argument (well, a short form of his argument) that "while it’s absolutely fair to complain that Obama doesn’t talk about climate change anymore, except at rallies when he’s firing up his liberal base, it’s also worth noting that he’s probably done more to prevent climate change than anyone else on the planet." Leaving aside whether he's correct about Obama, I think his general point is clearly correct: policy formation and implementation is more important than getting stuff into news broadcasts. The question is whether those things are independent of each other, but I think he's right that the Obama case shows they are at least largely independent of each other. For better or worse, a lot of the press doesn't cover policy, and so they can easily just miss important things that happen, especially at the regulatory level.

Second, digby raises a fair point about the bully pulpit:

I had thought the bully pulpit is not only useless, but often counter-productive, so this is a surprise to me. Ezra Klein explained it to us all in this New Yorker piece from 2012, wherein he outlined all the political science numbers-crunching that proves public opinion is fairly irrelevant to public policy and presidential rhetoric even more so. Indeed, the thesis says that while the president coming out publicly for a particular policy may be able to harden his own troops' resolve from time to time, he also hardens the opposition against him, so government basically can only be effective through the use of backroom deals and inside the beltway politicking:
[...]
So, considering how well the obsession wit the deficit has worked to make it a top priority issue,  I totally agree that the president should talk a lot about climate change.  I do think it makes a difference and I think the very act of doing it repeatedly puts it on the agenda and gives it an urgency.  Will he change climate change deniers minds?  Doubtful.  In fact, I agree that it may very well harden their opposition to any policies designed to prevent it, although it's hard to see how they could be more hardened than they already are.  But it could help persuade Democrats and Independents that this is something to which they need to pay attention and that's a necessary first step. So start yammering Mr President! 

See, this is where it gets tricky.

On the one hand: presidents can definitely get people talking about things, mainly by "agenda-setting" -- that is, by getting the news media to talk about things.

On the other, Klein's article was exactly right: it's not clear to what effect all that agenda-setting is for. And it has the potential to backfire.

Digby argues that Barack Obama's frequent public support of deficit reduction has had the consequence of pushing Democrats to become more likely to support deficit reduction in polls. That seems likely to me, but only because (with the president joining Republicans) there's an elite consensus, or close to it, for deficit reduction. But that wouldn't be the case on climate of course.

Moreover, and this gets back to Grunwald's point: to what effect? Suppose that liberals pushed Obama to talk about climate more often, and it had the effects I predict: he would in fact respond to that pressure by talking about climate more often, and it would yield more news coverage. Suppose that digby is correct that as a consequence, climate concern among Democrats would go up in polling...suppose even that Obama could change peoples' minds, so that the overall numbers on whether the government should do more on the environment tipped back towards the Democrats' position.

OK, then what? Would legislation be more likely to get through the current Congress? Not that I can see. Would the EPA and other government agencies be more likely to adopt tough regulations? Not really, I don't think; while public opinion might matter to them, relatively small shifts probably don't.

Would relatively small shifts in polling make it more likely that climate would be a higher agenda item for Democrats in 2014, or 2016? Harder to say...maybe? And that would very much be (if you want action on climate) a valuable result. But I'm not sure that the news media/agenda setting portion of it is really a particularly efficient way of getting there. Why not just directly organize within nomination battles?

And yet...on the other, other, other hand: as far as I understand it, the data we have on public opinion and the bully pulpit are mainly about short-term effects, and especially the (non-) effects of attempting to move Congress on specific legislation by changing public opinion. I don't think we know much, if anything (and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong) about long-term effects, if any. I mean, we know that Ronald Reagan didn't make US voters more conservative during his presidency...but I don't think we know anything about what, if any, long-term effects he might have had either on specific issues or ideology in general -- including effects concentrated within conservatives. Or, to put it the other way: we could have something here similar to campaign effects in which strong professional electioneering tends to cancel out; if one side saw the minimal effects results and decided to not campaign at all, we're fairly certain that it would create a very large effect. If Democratic presidents preach liberal ideals it might not change any minds, but if they don't, it might fail to "educate" a generation of Democratic activists.

I should wrap this up, but one more point. The holy grail on this, for climate activists, is to get mainstream conservatives (that is, non-crazy conservatives) to accept the scientific consensus on climate; if that happens, then it probably becomes relatively easy to get legislation done. Would agenda-setting through the media make that more likely? If it's accomplished by having a Democratic president talk more about it?

And yet what if mainstream conservatives would never be open to legislation? In that case, the best hope is for climate to be at the top of the Democratic agenda the next time they win a landslide and hold Congress and the presidency. Would more stories in the national press make that more likely?

I don't have answers to those questions. The main thing I would say is that the answers, from all we know from the research, are non-obvious. We really, really, should avoid any simplistic ideas about what presidents can do with their rhetoric...but should also be modest in what we know, and what it implies about what presidents should talk about.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to William Shatner, 82.

And some good stuff:

1. David S. Bernstein on Elizabeth Warren, Senator (bonus: David on Mo Cowan, Senator).

2. More on defunding political science, from Seth Masket.

3. Useful Suzy Khimm update on where sequestration stands.

4. Good David Roberts item on why climate change is not just another environmental problem.

5. Is it possible that Democrats now have a real, albeit small, electoral plurality favoring them? Molly Ball reports, with quotes from the great Laura Stoker.

6. And thank the writing gods we still have the great Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Debate Questions

There's been a lot of talk about debate question topics -- the Wonkblog gang yesterday did a nice item about the five most important issues not raised in the debates (housing, Europe, climate, Fed/SCOTUS appointments, campaign finance; I think the first four are good choices). I was wondering in particular about climate, and started thinking about 1996: after the failure of Bill Clinton's health care reform plan, did health care get as little attention that year as climate did after the demise of cap-and-trade?

And...nope. Turns out that in the first presidential debate there was a general question about health care, and in the second there was one general question and then a second one about managed care. And that's not to mention that Medicare was perhaps the most talked about topic over the debates that year.

So, basically, I'll toss in a negative finding for those who were concerned about this: there is no historical pattern in which a failed presidential initiative on a major issue leads to that issue disappearing from the issue agenda, at least as measured by presidential debate topics.

Now, that said, I pretty much liked the format this year which allowed the candidates to go back and forth during a block of time devoted to discussion topics. It meant fewer topics covered, I think, but more time for them to talk. And I don't really care much if any particular issue, no matter how important, isn't included, although from the point of view of critiquing the moderators I suppose I'm for more important rather than less important issues. But at any rate, I suspected that the absence of climate in the debates this year might have to do with the history of the last four years, and it turns out my guess wasn't supported by the evidence.

Revenge of the Son of the Return of Cranky Blogging

Now extra-cranky since my youngest started school today, thus switching my sleep schedule. That is, less.

So: I have two complaints about Robert Frank's pitch for a carbon tax in the Sunday NYT Business section.

The first complaint is a false-equivalency complaint. Well, actually, begin before that: I was highly annoyed from the beginning. He starts by saying "Don't expect to hear much about climate change at the Republican and Democratic conventions." Will that be true? Maybe, maybe not. It's just as likely that we'll hear plenty of climate denialism at the GOP gathering, perhaps in "jokes" about the world-wide conspiracy by climate scientists to convince everyone of something that they made up. And it's not at all unlikely that we'll hear a fair amount about climate from the Democrats.

Maybe not; maybe Republicans will be scared off the topic by the midwestern drought and Isacc, and Democrats will be scared off the topic by their fear of, well, Democrats can always scare themselves out of any issue. But actually, I expect to hear a fair amount about it from the Democrats next week. After all, as Frank does get around to mentioning, Democrats actually did try to do something fairly major on climate when they almost had the votes.

At any rate...sure, feel free to bash specific Democrats for putting short-term local interests over the long-term national interest, and feel free to complain about the Democratic strategy in 2009-2010. But Frank hardly acknowledges any difference between the parties on the issue, and that's nuts.

But that's not all! Frank annoys me on budgeting, too, by claiming:

many budget experts agree that federal budgets simply can’t be balanced with spending cuts alone. We’ll also need substantial additional revenue, most of which could be generated by a carbon tax.

"Can't"? Politically, perhaps, but that needs an explanation. Otherwise, of course the budget can be balanced with spending cuts alone. Just because they would be unpopular don't mean it couldn't happen. After, all, by that standard a carbon tax that increased the price of gasoline by $3/gallon also "can't" be done.

There's a point to this. I've been very insistent that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney should be called out for making budget promises that really don't add up: mathematically, they really can't, for example, slash tax rates by 20%, save the tax treatments that they say they want to save, keep middle-class taxes from rising, and achieve revenue neutrality. Can't be done, and they deserve to be absolutely slammed for it. But that's not the same kind of "can't" that Frank is talking about. It's fair to hold Republicans responsible for the cuts that a spending-only balance budget program would make, but not accurate to say that such a budget isn't possible. It's important, in my view, to reserve the "can't" for when it's really needed. Which, alas, is all too often.

What Mattered This Week?

Well, there was that thing with ACA and the Supremes.

Syria again, and I guess the Iran sanctions.

For the new regulations on coal, see here. Not sure whether that means it matters or not.

The House budget vote was this week...certainly doesn't have any substantive importance (although I guess it does tell us what Appropriations will be doing on the House side), but it's another vote that people are going to be attacking this fall.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Roger Craig. He's 82. When I was little, the Giants were a great team, and my memory stretches back to the end of that era, but my real memories of being a Giants fan was 1972-1985, when they were a joke franchise. You know -- we don't really have joke franchises any more in baseball. The Pirates are probably the closest it gets, and on the field as a bad team is even longer, but it doesn't seem quite like what the Giants (and Indians) were in that era, and what some other teams were earlier (hard to be a joke franchise when you have a decent ballpark). Anway -- then Al Rosen and Roger Craig showed up, and it's as if it never happened; the Giants have certainly had bad years since, but from Opening Day 1986 on they were just done with being a joke franchise. Hum baby, indeed.

The good stuff:

1. Brad Plumer has a nice post about the documents leaked from a climate denialist organization. Including this excellent point about their apparently minimal fundraising from the oil industry: "That’s a sign that climate skepticism has become less the sole concern of self-interested oil companies trying to fend off regulations — and more an ideological enterprise on the right."

2. Harold Pollack on the contraceptive flap.

3. At the Monkey Cage, Lucy Barnes cites the research on comparative taxation and concludes that the US taxes are in fact more progressive than most comparable nations, but at the same time US taxes and transfers produce less redistribution of wealth. Got that? If not, click through and read the explanation.

4. Update from yesterday's links: Jon Cohen explains the WaPo policy on using robopolls.

5. And Kylopod on the question of ideology in US politics.

Catch of the Day

To Ed Kilgore over at Washington Monthly, who read the WSJ editorial page, and so he deserves some sort of compensation. In this case, it was the WSJ's crazed support for the idea that the only reason anyone is concerned about climate change is immediate self-interest. As Kilgore says:

Gee, you’d think in all this tough-minded truth-telling about those with a financial stake in the climate change debate the Journal might have noted in passing that the most powerful economic interests on the planet have an interest in doing nothing about it.

Oh well. Kevin Drum piles on:

Climate change isn't merely wrong — that would be boring — it's an immense conspiracy being waged by a group of nerdy scientists (who want funding) and tree huggers (who are desperate to control everyone else's lives). And it's a damn successful conspiracy, too. Despite the fact that it requires thousands and thousands of participants from nearly every country in the world, with new collaborators earning PhDs every month, not a single one of them has broken the climate omerta yet and blown the whole thing open. But someone will, any day now. Just you wait.

Just to try to add a bit of value of my own here...while Drum, I think correctly, talks about long-term conspiracy theorizing on the right, I would add that a lot of the way conservatives talk now is very much driven by embarrassing presidential candidate and failed and disgraced Speaker Newt Gingrich. The other thing I'll say, and I should mention that this is purely speculative, is that in my view this kind of rhetoric is utterly ineffective at persuading anyone, and if anything tends to hurt with undecideds; what it's mainly good for is manipulating people who are already inclined to agree with you. Which is great if your goal is to squeeze more money out of your marks, but not particularly useful if you actually want to achieve policy goals.

Oy, Friedman

I'm not sure why I've been so Friedman-focused lately (maybe it's just Seth's fault), but...

So Tom Friedman's column today was fine but mostly pedestrian -- it's about climate change -- until he gets to the end:

Would you rather cut Social Security and Medicare or pay a little more per gallon of gas and make the country stronger, safer and healthier? It still amazes me that our politicians have the courage to send our citizens to war but not to ask the public that question.

What could he possibly mean by that?

Let's see...Barack Obama, of course, backed cap-and-trade. Which, Friedman also said earlier, was fine by him; in this column at least, he's equally happy with either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. So it can't be Obama he's talking about. After all, he was so courageous that he advocated cap-and-trade even without a bogus connection to Social Security!

House Democrats? They passed cap-and-trade. Clearly not them, either.

Senate liberals? Nope.

What about Rick Perry, who Friedman calls out in the column, and other Republicans who disagree with Friedman about climate? Surely their problem isn't courage, is it? At least not on this issue. Perhaps Friedman thinks they're nuts, or corrupt, or foolish, but it's hard to see how courage figures in to it.

That leaves two groups who Friedman might be talking about: moderate Democrats and Republicans who actually believe that climate change is a real and important problem, but oppose doing anything about it because they fear electoral consequences. And you know what? If Friedman wrote a column saying that those groups lack courage and should be willing to stand up for what they believe even at the possible cost of their electoral careers, I'd probably just stay quiet (I'm not sure I would agree, but it's a very legitimate argument). Or if wrote a column just about conservative deniers and how they poison the debate at the expense of their constituents. Or if he wrote a column about Republican indifference to most of domestic policy including climate, or a column about how the choice is very clear for those who believe that government should act on these issues.

Oh, but wait! Friedman seems to have missed the part where Obama and Congressional liberals supported cap-and-trade. He does realize that Republicans blocked it, but he claims that Obama "has chosen not to push for a price signal for political reasons." Hey, Tom Friedman: if Republicans blocked something, doesn't that imply that someone was pushing for it?

You know what? What set me off this time wasn't really Friedman (once again) apparently having no idea what the President of the United States has done during his time in office. No, it was what he thinks that president -- and all other politicians -- really need to do. Pass the policies Friedman wants? Nope. Read that quotation above again: what he really thinks they need to do is to ask a question.

Oy.

Q Day 3: The Future of Climate as an Issue?

An anonymous commenter:

How do you see the politics of global warming evolving as its effects increasingly effect average people? Will conservatives be hit for supporting bunk denier science? Or do you think Republicans will simply revise their stance and maintain similar levels of public trust and support? I know I'm asking a big question that hinges on future circumstances we can't exactly predict, but I'm curious to know your thoughts.

There are a couple things going on with climate. One is polarization; partisans are treating it as a normal partisan issue, which means they take on the views of their "side." The other is normal interest group politics. Those two things overlap, but they're not the same.

Two things could break the current impasse in favor of action.

One is that the configuration of interest group politics could change in favor of legislation. This could happen in a few different ways. Interests that favor the status quo might flip, if (for business interests) climate change makes it more profitable to support regulation (or other government intervention). The other would be if climate change pushes groups that are currently indifferent (such as, say, big agriculture) or are not currently organized (such as, say, people who live on coasts) to become highly active on the pro-intervention side. I don't really know enough about the science or the specific economics of things to know how likely any of those things might be.

The other is that the next time Democrats have working control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, they'll go ahead and pass something. I find that very likely. My guess would be that climate now sits very high on the list of priorities for Democratic activists, at least assuming that between now and then Republicans are unsuccessful in repealing anything that's already been checked off on liberal to-do lists.

But other than in sense that it changes the position of organized interests, I don't expect new evidence to change the views of partisans. The nature of this stuff is that no single event can be definitively tied to climate change, much less to human-caused climate change, and even less than that to the absence of any specific government-imposed solution. So I don't really expect events to change public perception very much over time. On the other hand, I could certainly see generational effects changing public opinion over time -- although I don't know whether the numbers actually fall on that.

Sunday Question for Liberals

How do you see policy about climate playing out over the next, say, decade?

Q Day 5: Future of Climate Legislation?

An anonymous questioner asks whether and when there may be action on climate issues.

I don't know that I have a lot of real insights on this one. What I can say is that assuming that ACA stays mostly in place, and assuming nothing really new emerges, that climate is certainly the biggest issue on the Democratic agenda. That means that there's a strong possibility that the next time Dems have a chance, they'll enact something.

Of course, health care was clearly the biggest issue on the Democratic agenda for 30+ years before ACA passed...passing major legislation is really hard.

On the other hand (and keep in mind I'm no expert in the substance of climate change), my understand is that significant things can be done through the regulatory process. I think the odds of major regulatory action over the next two years are low, but if there's an Obama second term, then the odds are pretty good. And of course it is certainly possible that there will be unified Democratic government in 2013-2014.

(On that last point; the only really unlikely combo in 2013, it seems to me, would be a Republican president and Senate and a Democratic House. The other combinations: unified either way, GOP president and Senate and Dem House, Dem president and Senate with GOP House, Dem president and GOP Congress -- did I miss any?  -- are unlikely. Oh, yeah; GOP president, Dem Congress; that's not going to happen).

What's the Climate S-CHIP?

I'm not the first to say that the big losers in the Democratic coalition over the last two years are probably the environmentalists.  Well, immigrant advocates, and perhaps labor, might dispute that, but in my view both were fighting a serious uphill battle against strong opposition.  Environmentalists had plenty of opposition, too, but it's certainly possible that a different Democratic president might have chosen climate/energy, rather than health care, as a landmark issue and actually got it done.  As it is, they didn't get nothing, but overall it wasn't a great two years for them.

Where do climate activists go from here?  Brad Plumer says:

Here's a quick sketch of how environmental policy will get made for the next two years. Congress won't pass any new laws. The EPA will try to use the authority it already has to mop up pollution from coal plants, factories, and vehicles (and the agency has a fair bit of existing authority to do so). Industry groups, Republicans, and more than a few Democrats will moan about the costs. And the Obama administration will then have to decide just how much confrontation it can really stomach. Any bets on how this will all play out?

My emphasis; see also Kevin Drum's reaction.

Their concern is centered on EPA, but I want to question the premise, that new law is impossible.  I don't think that's necessarily correct.  After all, the Democratic climate/energy bill in 2009-2010 is a pretty good comp for the Democratic health care initiative in 1993-1994 -- indeed, climate/energy came a lot closer to the president's desk this year than health care did back then.  And certainly comprehensive reform was dead after the 1994 landslide until Democrats won back unified control in 2008.  But only three years later, Bill Clinton signed the S-CHIP program into law.  Moreover, once passed, S-CHIP expansion became a winning electoral issue for Democrats (well, at least everyone acted as if it was a winner for Democrats; it probably didn't actually move votes, but that's not always the important thing).

This suggests to me that it's in fact quite possible that a bill could be possible.  Sooner or later there's going to be another issue that Republicans want enough to cut a policy deal, and environmentalists, it seems to me, are well-positioned within the Democratic Party to claim dibs on a legislative opportunity. 

However, I know next to nothing about the wonkish side environmental policy, so my question is: what's the climate S-CHIP? 

And if there isn't one, yet, then it sure seems to me that climate issue entrepreneurs should start preparing one.  Yes, EPA is an alternate route, and yes, a lot of energy is probably going to be going into defeating GOP plans to cut off EPA or curtail current regulations.  But there's probably some opportunity to go on the offense as well in Congress, and climate activists should be ready for it.

Health Care vs. Climate

I recently discussed the hypothetical choice between more stimulus and health care, and wound up with a quite interesting comments thread.  I stuck to stimulus vs. health care, because the "choice" that is being discussed today -- health care vs. climate -- seems to me mostly unrealistic.  Matt Yglesias (who would have preferred climate legislation if given a choice) sums up the situation nicely:  Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were pushed by the Democratic party coalition to put health care first, but at any rate  the combination of a rejectionist strategy by Republicans and regional differences among Democrats made a climate/energy bill a longshot at best. 

The one thing I'd add to what Yglesias says is just that, at least as I can see, health care really is a far more ideological issue than is climate. Fanciful rhetoric aside, the health care reform debate really was about a "government takeover" -- not of the health care industry, obviously, but of health care as a government obligation.  Establishing health care, in Ted Kennedy's old phrase, as a right, and not a privilege,  really is a big deal; whether or not it's an expansion of government, it's a serious and important expansion of governmental responsibility, and that surely hits along a core liberal/conservative line.  In other words, while it's easy to imagine Republicans modifying existing health care programs to achieve goals that Democrats might agree with, it's impossible to imagine a Republican House, Senate, or president agreeing to anything close to universal health care.  I really don't think climate works that way.  It's easy for me, at least, to imagine a situation in which conservatives and liberals agree that preventing climate change is a legitimate responsibility of government, and then finding some mechanism (and set of goodies for a winning coalition of interests) to make it happen.  (Yes, that does assume that ideology matters at least to some extent to at least some of the relevant actors). 

So, if all that is correct, then it makes sense for Democrats to use their rare supermajority on health care, which they can get in no other way, rather than on climate, which can be achieved in different circumstances.

Climate Down

The problem with postmortems about things like this is that there is usually more than one way to look at it, and they can all be valid.  For example, it's certainly true that if Republicans who supported cap-and-trade way back during the 2008 campaign had remained interested in working out a bill, then a bill would have passed.  So (and wording this from the perspective of something having gone wrong) you can blame the Republicans who in some sense "should" have been at the table: Snowe, Collins, Gregg, LeMieux, Gramm, McCain, and a few others.  Or you can blame the people who make Snowe, Collins, and the rest more concerned about primary challenges from the right than they are about anything else.  Or you can blame the candidates who fell just short of giving the Dems a few more Senators over the last three election cycles, or the voters who didn't quite elect them.  Or you can blame the filibuster.  Or you can blame the structure of the Senate, which makes it likely that the Senate won't run by pure majority party rule (although it doesn't force the specific filibuster rules in effect today).  Or you can blame Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller for putting the parochial interests of their states above the national interest and their party's platform.  Or you can blame Harry Reid and other Senate leaders for not working out a deal with those Senators.  Or you can blame Barack Obama for placing too low a priority on climate/energy.

All of those things are true!  And they're not exactly competing explanations; they're all true, but just look at the issue from different perspectives.

I'll mainly repeat the point I've made before: it's worth noting that on a legislative time scale, cap-and-trade was really very, very, new, and most important laws tend to take a long time, often spanning several Congresses, to pass.  Looking back...in 1992, global warming was a two-sentence throwaway at the end of the Democratic Party platform.  If anything, it's even less prominent in 1996. In 2000, the Al Gore platform contained a fair amount of climate rhetoric -- but proposed almost no specific actions.  No change in 2004: plenty of rhetoric, but only vague calls to action, mostly focusing on international agreements.  No cap-and-trade, no carbon tax.  So for Democrats, the idea that Congressional action is needed to limit carbon emissions as a core party principle only goes back to the 2008 campaign.

Matt Yglesias has a nice post up about the the regional complications of a carbon bill.  What I'd add is that these are the sorts of things that can and do get worked out as bills move through the process.  Think about the conflicts between rural and urban areas in health care legislation, for example.  To look at the larger picture...legislating in the American, Madisonian system tends to be about interests.  Until a bill actually starts moving through the legislative process, it's hard for supporters to know which interests they need to buy off, which they need to defeat, which they need to find compromises with, and what those compromises might be.  No one knows how strong the opposition of nominally opposed groups might be (nor, for that matter, how strong the support of nominally supportive groups might be).  No one knows which opposition groups can be bought off, nor what it would take to buy them off.  No one knows which Senators are available with those potential compromises.  Of course, proponents can guess, and the campaign tends to provide clues about these things, but nothing can really substitute for actually bringing a bill to the table that is headed for a committee mark-up. 

Now, I'm not saying that all of this made climate/energy impossible to pass in this Congress.  Plainly, Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats placed a lower priority on climate than they did on stimulus, health care, and the banking bill.  If climate/energy had been the first thing out of the box in January 2009, it probably would have passed -- but stimulus gets delayed, with unknown but potentially dire consequences.  If climate/energy is the big push in the spring and summer of 2009, well, perhaps it passes, perhaps not -- but health care probably doesn't.  Lots of unknowns in any counterfactual speculation, but one certainly must accept that there were risks and trade-offs (as well as opportunities) involved in any other path.  I also think that Kevin Drum has a good point that action really does involve some pain, and at least in my opinion it's understandable why Obama didn't want to stress policies that would involve additional sacrifice in the middle of an economic trauma.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that climate has now moved way up on the unfinished agenda of mainstream Democrats, which bodes well for some bill passing the next time that the Dems have unified control of Congress and the presidency.  And it's by no means certain that GOP rejectionism is a permanent strategy; there are plenty of possible paths that could lead back to a significant minority of Republicans in Congress being willing to support climate legislation.  Of course, should Republicans win back the House and hold it for a decade, then climate legislation might not happen for a long time.  I'm certainly not going to make any predictions about election outcomes down the road.  All I would say is that climate legislation got much, much farther in the 111th Congress than it ever had before; that Democratic activists will almost certainly place a much higher priority on the issue going forward than they have in the past; and that both of those are very good long-term predictors of successful action, if and when the Dems next get a chance to act.

[UPDATE: Please see important substantive comments from "Anonymous" below, who thinks that I got this one pretty wrong, and then my response].

Learning and Passing Laws

I've mentioned a couple of times now that one of the key things about the public option during the health care fight was just how new a policy idea the public option really was -- it was basically invented for the 2008 campaign.  I think that was part of why it was so hard to get it passed.

By contrast, health care as a general topic was, in legislative terms, ancient.  Supporters knew the terrain real, real, well, and a large part of why 2009-2010 had a different outcome than 1993-1994 was that Congress and the White House over the last two years treated the previous failure as a trial run.  Now, we don't know yet exactly which things made a difference -- and the composition of the Senate, which had nothing to do with legislative strategy, was a key part of success this time.  So I don't mean to suggest that we should put too much weight on strategy.  However, I tend to think that to the extent that strategy mattered, the Democrats consistently chose the path that made eventual passage more likely, in large part because they learned from previous mistakes.

What strikes me about climate change, then, as I read things such as this interview, is how new this issue really is.  Sure, it's been around for over a decade, but this is really the first-ever serious legislative effort.  Energy, of course, isn't new, and neither is the environment.  But climate change?  It really is a fairly new legislative topic.  As such, I think there was an enormous amount of uncertainty going in...it wasn't clear which interests had to be coddled, and which ones opposed; which Democratic Senators were likely to be on board without trouble and which would be tricky; which political allies needed to be enthusiastic and which needed only to be satisfied.

Now, I have to say that I'm not a policy expert, by any means, so I'm not as familiar with any relevant literatures as I might be.  I know of Nelson W. Polsby on Political Innovation, and David Mayhew's America's Congress, which is about individual Members and how they affect policy, but neither of those is really about what I'm talking about, I don't think.  And there are numerous how-a-bill-becomes-a-law books, such as Victoria Farrar-Myers and Diana Dwyre's Limits and Loopholes (about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill) that invariably span several Congresses from the introduction of an idea until the president's signing ceremony.  I'm not aware, however, of any study about how long it takes successful bills to become laws.  At any rate, it sure seems to me that the normally time frame for successful legislation is just short of forever, and that the relative inexperience everyone had with climate as an active issue may turn out to have been a big part of the difficulties the climate/energy bill has encountered during this Congress.

Summer Blockbuster: Summit 2?

As I said in my speech reaction post, I don't think the tepid endorsement of the bill formerly known as energy/climate really matters very much: what matters is what comes next.  And I can't see any real downside for the president if he chooses to invite everyone back to Blair House for another summit. 

First of all, the Republicans might refuse.  That would be a victory for the president.

Second, it's possible that some Republicans might actually show up looking to make a deal.  Obviously, that's a victory for the president.

Third, and most likely, the Republicans would repeat their health care performance: they would show up with focus-group-tested talking points that wouldn't stand up very well to the president's knowledge of the subject, especially since he's the one who gets to control the microphone (and, yes, Obama should insist on the same format as the health care summit, take it or leave it -- again, what are they going to do?). 

Now, mostly the effects of a summit would be minor.  It would probably make Democrats feel good, and I suspect would make for some rather uncomfortable moments for Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and other Republicans who have at times claimed that they wanted a bill -- which, again, would make Democrats feel good.  I don't think that spin is all that important, but I do think that (for whatever incremental amount it's worth) that Obama is much better off if everyone is talking about a bill than if they're talking about the oil spill. 

Mostly, however, it would be worthwhile as a signal that Obama and the Democrats are really serious about getting a bill this year.  It is true that we're not at an analogous stage in the process in terms of the parliamentary situation, but I think we are at a similar stage in terms of the question of whether the thing is really going forward or not.  Sending a strong, unambiguous signal that something is going to pass could, I think, matter a bit.  Right now, I think most Democrats in the Senate probably believe there's a fair chance they can duck the issue entirely.  Forcing the issue will force them off the fence, and push them to make whatever deals they need to make to vote for the bill.  To the extent that downgrading or removing climate from the bill means that Republicans might vote for it, the same is true for them. 


That's all if there's a real chance for a bill, and assuming that Obama wants one.  If not -- if he'd rather have the issue -- it sure seems to me that a summit works, too.  Again, I'm really not seeing a down side (anyone?  explain it to me in comments).  I don't know if that's where the administration is headed, but the president is using the same rhetoric about accepting good Republican ideas that he used for health care, and so maybe that's where they're headed.  If so: good choice.