Sanders and Clinton on Climate Change

Recently two liberal activists have publicly stated their positions in the Democratic presidential primary: Bill McKibben endorsed Sanders and Tom Hayden endorsed Clinton. With the campaigns moving into territory like New York, Pennsylvania and eventually California, it is interesting to compare what these two men said about the candidate's positions on climate change (especially fracking).

McKibben mostly critiques Clinton for her "evolution" on issues.

Ties to the past define Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She’s run on her experience, and she’s relied on senior voters for her margins of victory. Her call is for slow and evolutionary change, for a “realism” that rejects the supposedly romantic and idealistic hopes of her competitor.

At least on climate change, slow and evolutionary change is another way of giving up. Because the world is changing so damned fast.

Here's why he supports Sanders.

...mostly it’s because there’s never been any need for his positions on these issues to evolve. Keystone? “No” in September 2011, not in September 2015. He co-sponsored the bill to stop fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Fracking? Nothing complicated, just a simple, “No.”

Hayden discusses other issues in his endorsement. But here is what he said about the candidate's positions on climate change.

Hillary wants limits on fracking: a ban where individual states have blocked it, like in New York; safeguards against children’s and family exposures; a ban where releases of methane or contamination of ground water are proven; and full disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. Bernie’s position is that he’s simply against all fracking.

But Hillary’s position goes beyond what virtually any state has done. The New York Times writes that she “has pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay for her ambitious climate plan” and intends to install 500 million solar collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that will bring a even greater change.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s total fracking ban leaves the question of how to do so unaddressed. His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of Citizens United?

I've become accustomed to hearing that Sanders is more "progressive" on climate change than Clinton. So after reading these two endorsements, I decided to compare what their campaign web sites say about this issue (Clinton and Sanders). Other than the differences on fracking discussed above, I found very little daylight between the two of them. They both want to transition away from fossil fuels, invest in clean energy development and infrastructure, end tax subsidies for oil and gas companies and lead the world in combating climate change.

As Hayden notes, Sanders' plan includes one unique proposal:

Convene a climate summit with the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists and indigenous communities in his first 100 days. The United Nations Paris climate talks in December are an important milestone toward solving climate change, but even optimistic outcomes of these talks will not put the world on the path needed to avoid the most catastrophic results of climate change. We must think beyond Paris. In the first 100 days of Bernie’s Presidency, he will convene a summit of the world’s best climate experts to chart a course toward the healthy future we all want for our families and communities.

Clinton's plan also includes one unique proposal.

Building a 21st century clean energy economy will create new jobs and industries, protect public health, and reduce carbon pollution. But we can’t ignore the impact this transition is already having on coal communities. Hillary’s $30 billion plan to revitalize coal communities will ensure coal miners, power plant operators, transportation workers, and their families get the respect they deserve and the benefits they have earned; invest in economic diversification and job creation; and make coal communities an engine of US economic growth in the 21st century, as they have been for generations.

In the end, unless you base your decision on the differences between these candidate's position on fracking or the importance of supporting those who are being impacted by the death of coal, I don't see how either of them lays claim to being more progressive on this issue.

Young Arabs Are Rejecting ISIS

Joby Warrick brings some interesting news today in the Washington Post.

Two years after proclaiming a new “caliphate” for Muslims in the Middle East, the Islamic State is seeing a steep slide in support among the young Arab men and women it most wants to attract, a new poll shows.

Overwhelming majorities of Arab teens and young adults now strongly oppose the terrorist group, the survey suggests, with nearly 80 percent ruling out any possibility of supporting the Islamic State, even if it were to renounce its brutal tactics.

A year ago, about 60 percent expressed that view, according to the 16-country survey released Tuesday.

“Tacit support for the militant group is declining,” concludes a summary report by the poll’s sponsor, ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm that has tracked young Arabs’ views in annual surveys for the past eight years. Other recent surveys have found similarly high disapproval rates for the Islamic State among general populations in Muslim-majority countries.

The article doesn't attempt to describe why this is happening. But I immediately thought of what Eli Berman and Jacob Shapiro wrote about President Obama's containment strategy with ISIS.

We’re fighting a failed state in the making, one that will implode if merely contained, and will collapse even faster under coordinated economic and military pressure from its neighbors...

As the Soviet Union was to communism, so ISIL is to jihadism: the purest articulation of a noxious ideology of governance, which incidentally has little connection to Islam. If we allow it to fail, then it will be clearly a failure of ISIL as an idea. The same is not true of a military defeat at the hands of Western forces. Given its deep structural weaknesses and its symbolic value in the global war of ideas, our best strategy is almost surely one based on containment, allowing the group’s motivating ideology to destroy the group from the inside—and thus more rapidly find its proper place in the dustbin of history.

The containment strategy involved more than simply using U.S. air power to support the coalition of Arab states fighting on the ground to deny territory to ISIS. It also included efforts to starve the group of financial resources and new recruits to carry on it's agenda.

What we might be witnessing is the kind of success on that last front that would not have been possible if we had implemented the kind of strategy Republicans tend to support and "carpet bombed" major territories in the Middle East.

As Warrick goes on to report, there are still places where Arab youth have no love lost for the United States.

Arab youth were generally mixed in their views of the United States. More than 60 percent saw Washington as an ally, with the strongest positive rankings coming from Persian Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. By contrast, more than 90 percent of Iraqis regarded the United States as an enemy. Dislike for Washington was nearly as high in Yemen and in the Palestinian territories, and more than half of Lebanese youth said they saw the United States as an enemy.

To the extent that the United States had done what ISIS wants and engaged in a holy war with Islam, we would have made the terrorist group a much more attractive draw to many of these young people. One need only contemplate what led 90% of Iraqi youth to see us as an enemy. The legacy of the Bush/Cheney war lives on.

President Obama has rejected the Washington Playbook when it comes to defeating ISIS. As a result, the "noxious ideology" of ISIS is becoming apparent and destroying the group from within.

Cost Control Measures in Obamacare

Prior to Obamacare, there were two big problems in our health care delivery system: access and affordability. Most of what people know about what has changed since the reforms were passed in 2010 have to do with access. Other than expansion of Medicaid and subsidies, there hasn't been much discussion about what Obamacare put in place to tackle the affordability problem.

For example, I find that very few people are aware of the provision related to medical loss ratios (what Rick Ungar once called "the bomb buried in Obamacare"). They limit the amount of premium dollars that insurance companies can collect to pay for administration and profit to 15% (20% for those who market to individuals and small groups*). If insurance companies collect more than that limit in any given year - they are required to provide refunds to their customers.

Of course, that is a reform to the way health insurance is provided. I remember that when Obamacare originally passed, Ezra Klein pointed out that when it comes to cost control related to actual health care, there wasn't a lot of consensus on what would work. And so just about every idea was captured in the law as an experiment (sounds exactly like how Kloppenberg described Obama's philosophical pragmatism which, "embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation").

As Michael Grunwald writes, the administration is about to launch another one of those experiments.

The experiment the administration will announce today, a program called Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, is intended to shake up the way 20,000 doctors and clinicians treat more than 25 million patients when it goes into effect in January 2017. In a sharp departure from the current “fee-for-service” system, which offers reimbursements per visit or procedure, providers who volunteer to participate will received fixed monthly fees for every patient and bonuses for meeting various quality goals. When their patients stay healthier and require less-expensive care, many primary care doctors will also share in the savings to Medicare, Medicaid or private insurers.

As someone who comes from Minnesota where "managed care" was invented as an alternative to "fee for service," it is important to point out how this incentive program is different.

Studies have shown that about a third of all healthcare is a waste of money; the joke in the medical world is that nobody knows which third. The “managed care” craze that flamed out in the late 1990s basically empowered HMOs to try to figure it out. In some ways, CPC-Plus uses a similar per-patient payment model, except the primary care doctor rather than the insurer will be responsible for managing the care.

We've already seen how incentives in Obamacare have dramatically reduced hospital readmissions - another one of the "experiments" contained in the bill. So it will be important to keep an eye on this one.

Is Uncertainty a Liberal Value?

When the Obamas moved in to the White House, they made some changes to the artwork that decorated their new home. The painting above by Ed Ruscha titled "I Think I'll..." was one they chose. At the time, a friend of mine told me that he thought it said something important about our new president. James Kloppenberg, who wrote the book Reading Obama, would probably agree.

It has become a cliche to characterize Obama as a pragmatist, by which most commentators mean only that he has a talent for compromise - or an unprincipled politician’s weakness for the path of least resistance. But there is a decisive difference between such vulgar pragmatism, which is merely an instinctive hankering for what is possible in the short term, and philosophical pragmatism, which challenges the claims of absolutists…and instead embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation.

Elsewhere he wrote:

After almost two years as president, Obama has failed to satisfy the left for the same reason that he has antagonized the right. He does not share their self-righteous certainty.

Having grown up in a family and community where questioning was discouraged in favor of dogma handed down by those in positions of authority, I learned that an embrace of difficult questions and uncertainty was the only path available to me if I wanted to sort through what I truly believed. It was a terrifying journey to learn to think for myself and admit that I didn't always have the answers. In the end, it left me extremely wary of anyone who presented themselves as an ideologue enveloped in certainty. We tend to think that people like that inhabit the right wing of the political spectrum. But it is not their domain exclusively. In addressing liberal bloggers at Daily Kos, the President himself once wrote:

...to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

I think about all that these days as I watch the political discussions taking place during this presidential primary. Of course, a competition like the one between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tends to crowd out questions and uncertainty. As a result, no one is really listening and any discussion that happens merely leads to defensiveness and digging in to established positions.

I've come to believe that listening requires a suspension of certainty - at least long enough to hear what the other person is saying and attempt to empathize with where they are coming from. It also requires some curiosity about perspectives different from our own. It is in that spirit that I ask the question: Are things like uncertainty, listening, curiosity and empathy liberal values?

President Obama Lets His Nerd Flag Fly

One of the lesser-discussed controversies about President Obama is whether or not he qualifies as a jock or a nerd. We all know that he loves sports (both as a spectator and participant) and is quite competitive. But I remember that early on in his presidency, the nerds of the world were pretty excited about finally having one of their own in the White House. That was true for a resident blogger at Political Animal.

For the record, President Obama has collected Spider-Man comics; he knows the name of Superman’s father; he’s a fan of Star Trek; and can, rather effortlessly, offer a Vulcan salute.

Ezra Klein (noted nerd) was impressed as well.

Obama is by far the most culturally awesome president this country has witnessed. That doesn't mean his presidency won't be a catastrophic failure. But, if anything, the press has been much too restrained in their commentary on Obama's virtues. Forget beers: This is a president I could play Halo 3 with.

But perhaps the greatest disquisition on President Obama's nerdiness came from John Hodgman's speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondent's Dinner. It was hilarious with a powerfully serious kicker at the end.


This week, the President sets out to let his nerd flag fly. First of all, he will host the 6th annual White House Science Fair this week. That will, no doubt, lead to more photos like this one from the 2012 event (seriously...only a true geek gets this excited about a marshmallow air canon).


Secondly, comes this:

Having survived his first interview as POTUS on Fox News’ Chris Wallace-hosted Sunday Beltway show, Obama will guest present five segments for the network’s nightly science news coverage, Science Presents DNews, which airs weeknights at 9PM. His updates will cover a wide range of innovations in public health, space, and technology.

On a more serious note, President Obama has done a lot to promote science during his administration - particularly when it comes to encouraging the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and innovators. He has even gone so far as to suggest that they deserve as much attention as our famed jocks.

“As a society, we have to celebrate outstanding work by young people in science at least as much as we do Super Bowl winners. Because superstar biologists and engineers and rocket scientists and robot-builders… they’re what’s going to transform our society. They’re the folks who are going to come up with cures for diseases and new sources of energy, and help us build healthier, more successful societies.” -President Obama

Grover Norquist's Plan to Stop Hillary...Seriously

Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion about the Rising American Electorate (unmarried women, millennials and people of color) that Barack Obama tapped into in order to win two presidential elections. Back in November, Stan Greenberg cautioned that these voters weren't being engaged in the 2016 election. But in a more recent poll, he found that things had changed.

The disengagement pall has been lifted. Our focus groups with white unmarried women, millennials and African Americans showed a new consciousness about the stakes in November. In this poll, the percentage of Democrats giving the highest level of engagement has increased 10 points.

The result is that the country might be heading for an earthquake election in November.

Rather than embrace the recommendations of the RNC autopsy report following the 2012 presidential election, the response of Republicans has typically been to drill down on the idea that there are millions of white voters they can tap into who didn't show up to vote for Mitt Romney. But even Sean Trende, whose original article spurred that discussion, says that there aren't enough missing white voters available to swing an election.

Into this breach comes Grover Norquist with...what can I say...a "creative" solution. He has identified six new voting blocs that have developed over the last 30 years that won't want Hillary Clinton in the White House. Between the lines, his contention is that she is just so out of touch with what is happening in the world that she's missed them.

Either this revelation is so ground-breaking that no one in the political world is as in-touch as Norquist, or it's a load of huey put out by someone who is desperately grasping at straws rather than face the fact that his predictions about a "permanent Republican majority" are drowning in a bathtub.

Here are Norquist's six voting blocks that will challenge the Rising American Electorate:

1. Home schoolers
2. Charter school supporters
3. Concealed-carry permit holders
4. Fracking workers
5. Users of e-cigarettes and vapor products
6. Uber drivers

I kid you not! Those are the voting blocs Grover Norquist said the Republicans can tap into in order to stop Clinton in November. We could spend some time deconstructing each one. But that would give this nonsense from Norquist more attention than it deserves. I merely point this out in order to show how vacuous Republican attempts are these days to deal with the fact that they are in the midst of alienating large swaths of the American electorate. If the best they've got to combat that reality is mobilizing people like e-cigarrette users, you know they're in big trouble.

Preserving National Monuments is Good for the Economy

As I have noted previously, President Obama has used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to preserve over 260 million acres of land and water as national monuments - more than any previous president. The stunning vista in the photograph above comes from the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, which was designated in March 2013. I have had the good fortune to visit this area on several occasions, and it is truly a remarkable place.

The monument includes an assortment of geographical attractions. The most prominent is the Rio Grande Gorge. The gorge is the result of a continental rift where two plates are separating at an extremely slow pace. This part of the Rio Grande has numerous hot springs and some class 5 rapids at the “Taos Box”. The gorge is home to bighorn sheep, river otters, beaver, ringtail, porcupine, bear, cougar, and many other species. The petroglyphs created by early Native Americans can be found on the rocks adjacent to the river. In addition to the Rio Grande Gorge, the monument includes Ute Mountain and San Antonio Mountain, both extinct volcanoes. A smaller gorge follows the Rio San Antonio to the west of the Rio Grande. The monument also includes open plains where elk and pronghorn antelope can be seen.

Preserving these natural wonders is what is often considered when they are designated as national monuments. Keeping them available for the public to visit and enjoy is also part of goal. But in what might be called a win/win/win, the Small Business Majority just released a report on how these newly designated national monuments are providing a boost to the local economies.

This study examines the economic impacts associated with visitation to 10 national monuments designated by an Obama Administration executive order. The report found the combined natural and cultural national monuments have a total economic impact of $156 million per year on the local economies surrounding the monuments, including direct and secondary impacts. Economic activity generated by national monument visitation contributes $58 million in labor income per year in the local communities surrounding the national monuments.

Maintaining public access is what provides opportunities for small businesses. Here is what the owner of Taos Fly Fishing Shop said about that:

I've been involved with the Rio Grande monument campaign for a few years on a volunteer basis. Now that it has been designated, we have seen a small increase in business. The vast majority of our guide business happens on forest service or BLM land. The thought of losing access to those is very troubling as it would certainly put us out of business.

I'm grateful that one of my favorite places on the planet will be preserved for future generations to enjoy. And it's nice to know that the Taos Fly Fishing Shop is benefiting as well.