First, let's look at the state-wide picture, which isn't so bad relative to the rest of the country (as always, click to embiggen):
The highest and lowest billed amounts are national figures, not Wisconsin specific numbers. By and large, however, Wisconsin patients appear to get billed below the national average, which is to be expected given variables like income and cost of living. The most expensive state appears to be New Jersey, while the least is Maryland.
So far, a good deal of the analysis has been centered on the difference between hospitals in close geographic proximity to each other. Like this:
When a patient arrives at Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey requiring treatment for the respiratory ailment known as COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she faces an official price tag of $99,690.
Less than 30 miles away in the Bronx, N.Y., the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center charges only $7,044 for the same treatment, according to a massive federal database of national health care costs made public on Wednesday.
In the District [of Columbia], George Washington University’s average bill for a patient on a ventilator was $115,000, while Providence Hospital’s average charge for the same service was just under $53,000. For a lower joint replacement, George Washington University charged almost $69,000 compared with Sibley Memorial Hospital’s average of just under $30,000.
Loyola Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park, Ill., outside Chicago, charged the highest prices for 16 of the 24 procedures reviewed by HuffPost. For kidney failure, Loyola Gottlieb charged $97,926, more than twice average cost of 59 hospitals in the Chicago area. The price is more than five times what John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, 12 miles to the east, charges.
That's not entirely fair. Not all hospitals are created equally, and this is especially true in urban areas where the variety among health care centers is particularly noticeable. Some hospitals are teaching centers attached to universities. Some have to maintain expensive trauma centers that likely need to be subsidized with revenue from other departments. Others provide amenities, like a guaranteed private rooms per patient. Some only treat children, some specialize in specific ailments, etc. All of these variables will increase or decrease the costs of a given hospital's services.
But hospitals start to look much more alike when one moves away from the population centers. Lets look at the local level here in Oshkosh. Here are the prices for comparable procedures at the two hospitals in Oshkosh. The figures below are for the year 2011:
That last unlabeled column is how much more expensive the cost of a procedure is at Aurora relative to the cost at Mercy Medical Center. The average mark-up is about 78.25% (that's my quick math/not double-checked figure).
That's kind of amazing. I can't think of a single good or service available in the Fox Valley that costs almost twice as much at one place as its does at its closest competitor.
It's difficult to say why Aurora costs so much more than Mercy. One would be hard pressed to argue that Aurora is 78% more superior than it's competitor just 1.6 miles down the road. In fact, most of the scuttlebutt among the doctors I've gleaned over recent years has been that the opposite is actually true: that Mercy is actually the better place not only receive care, but also to work.
By the way, I only briefly glanced at the data for Theda Clark Medical Center in Neenah, which is almost universally regarded at the gold standard for health care in the Fox Valley, and it's costs appear to be even lower than Mercy's. (It's also not at all surprising for those of us "lucky" enough to have dealt with all three hospitals recently.)
There is a lot that remains to be said about the gulf between health care billing. I don't think anyone will be disappointed that this kind of information will add some much needed transparency to the mystery of medical costs. People who think the America health care system is just fine and dandy will predict that costs will undergo a "market correction:" Aurora will need to slash it's prices to remain competitive while Mercy will potentially hike up it's own rates because, well, it can. That's how the free market works.
But the difference in cost between Mercy and Aurora is a big reason how we got into the medical cost mess we're currently negotiating in this country. It's very easy to say that one company is simply doing a better job than the other at keeping costs down and that one will simply disappear if it can't remain competitive -- that's fine if you're talking about, say, a toy manufacturer since the customers in that scenario don't stand to lose much. Health care is a different story altogether, especially since insurance companies very frequently determine which health care systems their policy-holders must use. For people without insurance the consequences could be catastrophic: the difference between treating kidney failure with comorbid conditions (683 on the spreadsheet above) at Aurora as opposed to Mercy is an additional $26,000. It's easy to see how people who don't make much more than that a year suddenly find themselves in dire financial straights.
It's also a pretty strong validation of the work of former Oshkosh state legislator Greg Underheim, who made cost transparency in health care a signature issue. It wouldn't surprise me that most health care consumers understood, if only intrinsically, how arbitrary medical cost could be, but I doubt anyone would have assumed we would be looking at such a stark example so close to home. It clearly remains to be seen if this level of transparency will be enough to curb exploding medical costs, but this is the kind of measure that patients should have had years ago.
Senator Ron Johnson recently took a lot of grief for his procedural vote against recent gun control legislation in the senate, so he took to the august pages of something called Right Wisconsin (more on this later) to explain his vote. He explains one of what he considers the numerous flaws of the bill:
For example, the bill would have made it a crime for you to give a gun to your nephew as a gift, or lend a rifle to your cousin for deer season, without first paying for a background check. It also would have required a federal record of every firearm sale - recording who was the buyer and what was purchased.
As under current law, temporary transfers do not require background checks, so, for example, you can loan your hunting rifle to your buddy without any new restrictions or requirements.
And,
As under current law, transfers between family, friends, and neighbors do not require background checks. You can give or sell a gun to your brother, your neighbor, your coworker without a background check. You can post a gun for sale on the cork bulletin board at your church or your job without a background check.
And,
Our bill explicitly bans the federal government from creating a registry and creates a new penalty for misusing records to create a registry—a felony punishable by 15 years in prison.
Johnson seems to have bought into the lie that the NRA was propagating about this very subject prior to the vote. Either Johnson is carrying the NRA's water, or he lying himself. Either way he doesn't exactly come off looking good.
But back to the fact that this piece appears at "Right Wisconsin," which is Charlie Sykes' latest attempt to squeeze revenue out of Waukasha County pensioners. I just don't see what audience he's trying to speak to here. Anyone who would go to this website would likely already be a conservative nutter who doesn't need Johnson to justify his vote. The moderate Republicans who might have found fault with his vote, those members of the 80% of Wisconsinites who favor reasonable gun control measures. Those people are probably not going to be dabbling in fringe right wing websites.
In case you missed it, Jonathan Krause had some things to say about Denmark this morning. The post is yet another one of Krause's attempts to justify his ideology by holding up anecdotal information and proclaiming it to be representative of a larger truth. The whole piece could be shortened to "See, I told you so!" but, of course, doesn't strand up to much scrutiny.
From this NYT article describing a recent push to reform the generous Danish social welfare system in the context of a few people who have appeared to abuse it, Kruase seems to be under the impression that the little Nordic nation is in imminent peril of complete economic collapse:
Denmark is the liberal utopia of Europe. Here are some of the government benefits afforded to its citizens:
Free health care
Free child care
Free education through six years of college
Four years of unemployment benefits
Free maid service for the elderly
Lifetime disability benefits
Government retirement pensions starting in your 50's
A minimum wage of $20 an hour--with short work weeks and extended vacations
This list is culled from scattered facts dropped throughout the course of the article and -- surprise, surprise! -- is not entirely accurate ... and by that I mean that Krause simply didn't read the article carefully enough. For example, Denmark no longer provides four years of unemployment benefits, but does provide two years. The free maid service for the elderly is available "if they need it" (and, as an aside, has apparently been privatized in recent years). Also, not only does Denmark provide six years of college free of charge to it's students, but it also gives them a nearly $1000 monthly stipend while they're hitting the books, so Krause is actually selling himself short on that account.
By the way, these benefits are provided to everyone--regardless of their need for government assistance or their ability to pay on their own. And of course, all of this is funded by the highest personal and corporate tax rates in all of Europe.
Wrong.
Sweden actually has a higher upper marginal income tax rate (56.6%). To be fair, Denmark is #2 and not very far behind at 55.4%. Yet while I may be splitting hairs with respect to personal taxes, I'm not with regard to corporate taxes, as Belgium (34%), France (33%), Germany (29.5%), Greece (26%), Italy (31.4%), Luxemburg (28.5%), Malta (35%), Norway (28%) and Spain (30%) all have higher corporate taxes than Denmark (25%) did last year. In fact, Denmark was actually just slightly below the OEDC average (25.4%) and not that much higher than the global average (24.08%). This is not a trivial detail, since Krause wants to portray Denmark as an anti-business commune for loafers. It's clearly not.
But now all of that [i.e. the generous welfare state] is threatened not by the global recession but by the growing attitude among the populace that it no longer "pays to work". The article describes how a single mother of two makes 47-thousand dollars in government benefits--without having to think about looking for a job.
Krause's math is incorrect. Here are the first two graphs of the times story:
COPENHAGEN — It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.
It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.
$2700 x 12 = $32,400, not $47,000 ... I don't know where he gets that number.
$32,000 sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but Krause is trying to confuse his readers into believing that we dole out just as much money to our welfare recipients as the Danes do. The truth is that there's really no good way to determine how much the "average" government assistance recipient receives due to the byzantine way the United States handles welfare. There are too many different programs (Medicare, SNAP, TANF, etc.) handled at both the state and federal level to come up with a convenient figure.
For example, the average monthly benefit for families enrolled in SNAP, what we used to call "food stamps" an is far and away the largest assistance program in the country, was $281 in 2012. That's $3372 a year, but "only 8 percent of all SNAP households received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, and another 4 percent received State General Assistance (GA) benefits. Over 22 percent of SNAP households received Social Security, and 20 percent received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits given to the aged and disabled." You can see how complicated divining such a figure can get ... the moral of the story is that such generous state aide as provided in Denmark does not exist here in America.
But let's return to the $32,000 for a moment. I noted that it both seemed like and was a lot of money, but it might actually not be. The average net income in Denmark is $36,712 -- that's after taxes, just to emphasize. But here's the real x-factor: Denmark is not an inexpensive place to live. Copenhagen, where about 1/3 of the population lives, is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, ranking #21 in this 2012 cost of living survey ahead of London, Paris, and New York. A dollar in Denmark just doesn't go as far as it would most anywhere else. (We'll get back to this thought in a little bit.)
The poster child of the new Danish attitude has become "Lazy Robert" Oleson--who is quoted in the article as boasting about having lived on welfare programs exclusively since 2001--and is pictured sitting in a curbside lounge chair, with his feet up, along the curb on a bright sunny day. Lazy Robert says most available jobs are "demeaning".
Add to that, the graying of of the Danish population and you run into the same problem every other nanny state reaches--too many on the dole, and not enough working to foot the bill.
So Denmark is making some changes to "encourage" people to actually get back to work and contribute to their society.
I'm not sure how much credibility a guy who proudly calls himself "Lazy Robert" has on policy issues relating to welfare, but he sure does add some lovely local color to the article!
So is Lazy Robert an outlier or the embodiment of just how far the mighty Norsemen of Denmark have fallen? Per the usual, Krause's assessment is complete nonsense. Here's Matt Yglasias:
As you can see above, both before and after the global economic downturn the share of the Danish population that works is substantially above the OECD average. The United States, which has one of the stingiest welfare states in the OECD is also above average in this regard. But Denmark exceeds even the United States in terms of the share of the population that's working.
In fact, unemployment in Denmark is lower than it is in the United States. Currently the Danish unemployment rate is 4.6% vs. 7.6% for the old USA. How else do you think the Danes pay for their expensive welfare state?
But this gets to another important point that seems to influence Krause perception of the world we live in: Krause seems to think that fiscal responsibility and a robust social safety net are incompatible. In fact, Denmark is evidence that they are, indeed, quite compatible:
It goes unmentioned in the [NYT] article that Denmark remains apart from the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone by possessing its own currency, the krone, and had strict banking regulations which insulated the country from the worst of the 2008-09 Financial Crisis. Furthermore, besides Denmark's AAA credit rating noted in the [NYT] article, Denmark possesses low inflation (2.6%), unemployment levels comparable to the U.S., a labor force participation rate comparable to the U.S., public debt (45% of GDP in 2012) at around half that of the U.S., Canada, or Germany, and is considered to be the 5th easiest country in which to business in 2013 (right behind the U.S.) by the World Bank.
In other words, Denmark's making it work. High taxes aren't discouraging people from working and a large welfare state doesn't necessarily have to put a nation under water if it's paid for upfront in the form of taxes that actually reflect the cost of social services. Furthermore, I'd conjecture that one of the reasons the Danish social safety net is so popular among the population is because they feel a certain ownership of it as a result of their considerable contributions to it.
To be sure, there will always be the need to tweek this policy or that as economic and/or culturally circumstances demand, but that's exactly what the NYT's article is all about. It's also not news at all: Denmark's been adjusting social benefits for some time now, as they did when they cut unemployment benefits in half three years ago; not because their financial situation forced them to, but because their financial situation was stable enough that they had the -- dare I say? -- freedom to improve public policy:
Denmark has long held the title of the best place on earth to be laid off. With an expensive, generous welfare state, and the world’s most lavish unemployment insurance scheme, virtually no one falls through the cracks upon losing a job.
But the government unveiled an unpleasant surprise in June [2010], when it halved the country’s whopping four-year unemployment benefits period to help mend its finances after the financial crisis.
The reason: Danish studies show that the longer a person goes without a job, the harder it is to find work. Many people get a job within the first three months of entering the system, but many more wait until just before benefits expire to take anything available.
“So you need to have a period of unemployment that is as short as possible,” Claus Hjort Frederiksen, the finance minister, told me recently in Copenhagen.
It's all part of what's called "flexicurity," a truly terrible neologism that's "a hybrid of free labor markets, unfettered business and adjusting welfare to give incentives for people to work so they can pay taxes to finance the benefits they get." It's a policy that, far from encouraging people to loaf around on the public dime, has achieved remarkable success in creating employment, even during the recession. Danish unemployment is only 0.5% higher today than it was when the global economy was booming in December 2005. Variations of the theme have sprouted up all over Scandinavia. Not that any of this matters to Krause:
I love this quote from the nation's Minister of Social Affairs who oversees the welfare state:
"They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. But now we have to go back to the rights and the duties. We all need to contribute."
Doesn't that sound eerily familiar to the arguments that were used for the Affordable Care Act and increased spending for colleges and universities "Every American has a right to cheap health care" and "Everyone has a right to a low-cost college education." You never seem to hear that "Everyone has an obligation to pay for that" too.
There certainly are a good number of people in America who like to yell that affordable, or even free, health care and/or education is a right. I don't count myself one of them. That's a philosophical discussion that I doubt will bear much fruit; but I do think affordable, and even free, health care and/or education is simply wise public policy. In Denmark, however, it's not a philosophical question at all: Danes have already paid for a good portion of their welfare state and are entitled to the same sense of ownership anyone feels for a service or property. You never seem to hear that "Everyone has an obligation to pay for that" -- but that's exactly what is said in Denmark.
The most ironic thing in how the nanny states are collapsing under their own weight, is that we here in America are being told all the time how we need to be "more like Europe"--when Europe is finding out they needed to be "more like us".
It should go without saying that Krause conclusion misses the point entirely, but what I'd really like to know is just who is out there saying "We need to be more like Europe"? Where are these people? Do they speak the Queen's English? Or are these just words placed in some group's mouth to paint them as effete elitists?
No one's ever going to accuse Krause of thinking deeply on this or any other subject, but I am disappointed he missed a golden opportunity to compare Denmark to Wisconsin. Both have largely homogeneous populations of about 5.65 million. Each has one major urban area that serves as a financial and cultural home to about 1/3 of the people. There are important differences too: Denmark's public sector is 32% of the workforce, Wisconsin's is 12%; Danish union membership is 87% of the workforce; Danes spend tens of billions of dollars on things like a navy that are provided for Wisconsin by the federal government, etc.
So why does it seem Denmark is punching above it's weight class in Europe while Wisconsin is merely keeping pace in the United States?
If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that Denmark has a unique imperative to invest in its own people that people in Wisconsin can't hope to have any time soon. Denmark is an ancient country with it's own language, culture, history, traditions, even it's own church. At the same time, Danes make up only 0.75% of the continent. All the things that make the Danish, well, Danish run the risk of evaporating in the 21st century quicker than you can say Hans Christian Anderson. The people of Denmark find high taxes acceptable because it's part of the preservation of their national identity and way of life in ways that are only loosely tied to economics.
Americans are unmoored of such concerns and it's something we consider to be one of our great strengths, but that doesn't mean that the opposite is necessarily wrong or bad. Krause doesn't seem to grasp this, possibly because he's fetishized American individualism to an absurd degree that he can't seem to grasp that the Danish economic model actually allows Danes an economic freedom that is unthinkable here in America:
The "flex" part of flexicurity is a flexible labor market. Workers can be fired with little notice. Roughly 800,000 Danes, or about 30% of the labor force, switch jobs each year, government statistics show. Only 10,000 of the turnover is attributed to layoffs. Most move on to what they see as better jobs.
This kind of job-hopping isn't possible in the United States where a large portion of the workforce is shackled to their current job, in many cases due to health care benefits. By unburdening the private sector of the insurance costs of its employees, Denmark fosters an environment where people can potentially take risks by going to another job or leave an otherwise stagnant work environment. It also has created a harmony between employers and employees and freedom from labor disputes that simply doesn't exist in America.
Does that mean everything's awesome on the shores of the Baltic Sea? Of course not, but to claim that something's rotten in Denmark based on a poor reading of single article is, well, it's actually pretty much par for the course for Krause.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
[Ron] Johnson was the only senator in either party who voted against the [background checks] bill who is from a state in what I have called “the blue wall”: the 18 states that have voted Democratic in at least the past six consecutive presidential elections. From those states, all 32 Democratic senators plus Republicans Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Susan Collins of Maine voted for the bill. Johnson’s opposition may be an anomaly for Wisconsin because he is accumulating an unwaveringly conservative voting record that could make it difficult for him to win reelection in 2016, when he must face a presidential-year electorate.
The aim of the project — putting a human face on government red tape — is noble. However, Johnson’s time, and that of his staff, would be better utilized in attempting to do something about it rather than in merely documenting the problem.
Lawmakers at all levels, from city hall to the halls of Congress, are made aware of government shenanigans through personal visits with constituents, phone calls and during town hall meetings. Not all government red tape, however, deserves the video treatment. It does deserve effort by lawmakers to rectify the situations presented to them, which is where Johnson should concentrate his efforts.
Then there is the matter of cost. Johnson spokesman Brian Faughnan said the video project is part of the official function of the Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight and is funded through the budget of the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. Faughnan did not immediately respond to a question about the project’s total cost, according to the Associated Press.
So we have a video project of unproven — but likely marginal — value at an unknown cost to taxpayers. That’s not much to go on.
Meanwhile, the folks at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel lash out at Johnson's threat to filibuster gun control legislation:
Make no mistake, the bill deserves a vote. The American public strongly favors tough background checks. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 94% agreed that people should undergo one when attempting to buy firearms.
We wonder if Johnson and his colleagues considered the long-term consequences of their actions. A broad majority of Americans favors expanded background checks for the sale of guns and a handful of Republican senators - in the aftermath of Newtown - try to block that legislation without so much as a vote?
[...]
As Sen. John McCain said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday: "I don't understand it. . . . What are we afraid of? . . . I do not understand why United States senators want to block debate when the leader has said that we can have amendments."
Johnson and the others who signed the letter should stop trying to use the arcane rules of the Senate to block democracy. The common sense idea of expanded background checks for firearm sales should come to a vote.
This is the first time we've seen a blacklash against Johnson on two separate issues in the same week. The fact that it comes so soon after his "re-election announcement" does not bode well for the Senator.
We were going to write up a yadda yadda yadda regarding Ron Johnson's "Victims of Government" web dealy when it debuted a week or whatever ago; but, frankly, just didn't care enough to do so. But now that the he's managed to break through from the NW and into the national consciousness with his own Memeorandum feed, we might as well play along.Thankfully, the editorial pages of the La Crosse Trib recently put pen to paper in a more concise way than we are capable of in a piece entitled "Ron Johnson and the victim society":
Conservatives used to argue, with some merit, that too many Americans possessed a hair-trigger victim complex. In 1989, columnist George Will decried “the growth industry of victimology.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told law school graduates at Liberty University in 1996, “Be a hero, not a victim. You can't be both at the same time. It's one or the other.”
If Thomas is right, then Wisconsin U.S. Sen Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, is asking citizens to forfeit their hero status.
Johnson wants citizens to openly parade their victimhood by announcing his “Victims of Government” project. He invites anyone “who has been dealing with excess regulation” to submit their stories to his government website.
Not just anybody is invited to join the victim party. If you served 10 years in federal prison for a crime you didn’t commit, don’t bother. Nor is the Senator interested in victims of lax government oversight — the 26 people who died in grain bin accidents in 2010, hourly workers who increasingly feel compelled to work off the clock by unscrupulous employers or anyone who got sick after eating tainted meat. The only victims Johnson bothers to champion are those who own land or own businesses.
The fact that Johnson feels compelled to use the resources of his Senate office to solicit victims undermines the validity of his case. If there are victims out there, why don’t they appear organically? Johnson actually needs to use taxpayer funds to root them out?
If Johnson really were committed to honest inquiry, he would hold town hall meetings and let citizens of all backgrounds and ideologies share their stories and perspectives.
Why not come to the Tomah High School auditorium and conduct a listening session that’s open to all? The feedback wouldn’t be preordained, but it would have the virtue of spontaneity and diversity. The Senator would hear from victims, no doubt. But he might hear from some heroes, too.
The last two paragraphs are particularly biting -- as Johnson has yet to conduct virtually any townhall type dialogues or listening sessions in his 2+ years in office. He prefers canned speeches to friendly crowds when he does deign to speak to his constituents (as opposed to the august Ayn Rand acolytes at the Atlas Society).
Johnson has a poor record of following through on his various beginning-of-the-year projects. It will be interesting to see what Episode 2 looks like ... or if he even bothers.
In total, 56 percent of respondents supported federal legal recognition of same-sex marriage while 43 percent opposed it.
The breakdown among party affiliation and generation is stark. Among those 18-34-years-old, 77 percent support federal recognition. Among those over 65-years-old, just 39 percent support it. Those in-between 34 and 65 hover around the 50 percent mark.
Along party lines, 75 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents and 28 percent of Republicans support recognition.
It's a good bet that support for gay marriage among GOP state legislators is much lower than 28% at the moment. I don't know any current office-holders who even support repealing the ban, even if they might not be so sanguine about permitting gay marriage.
Priebus wants his party to have it both ways. Public opinion is increasingly saying that this isn't possible. I don't see someone like Glenn Grothmann changing his tune on the matter any time soon.
I'm unaware of a single state GOP legislator who supports repealing the marriage ban. This is an opportunity for Democrats in Madison to make Republicans own up to positions that are rapidly reaching their expiration date. It's not like they can do much more considering they are in the minority in every branch of state government.
If this isn't the single most glaring indication that Scott Walker is running for White House in 2016, then I don't know what is.
MORE: For those unfamiliar with Marc Theissen's oeuvre, he's best known for his labored defense of "enhancedinterrogationtechniques" by the Bush administration and arguably the most uncomfortable interview yet to appear on the Daily Show.
The ghostwriting gig also makes Theissen Walker's first (de facto) foreign policy adviser, and since Walker has exactly zero foreign policy experience, one can safely assume that the governor has decided simply to outsource his own thoughts on the subject to the neoconservative wing of the GOP, of which Theissen is a card-carrying member.
But all this means is that Scott Walker just brought the nation's pre-eminent torture apologist into his inner circle.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has dispelled speculation that he would only serve one term by announcing to GOP allies that he will run for reelection in 2016, according to sources.
Johnson met with a small group of Republican strategists at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Thursday to discuss his future.
“He had a meeting with some of the heavy hitters from the downtown GOP community at the NRSC. Sen. Johnson told them he would run again,” said a GOP source familiar with the meeting.
The reporter from The Hill got two people who attended the meeting to speak on the record about it -- which means this is less of a scoop and more of an intentional leak. Also, it's hardly a "kitchen cabinet" meeting when you meet with "heavy hitters" from the NRSC in downtown Washington; unless, of course, Cuisinart is producing a line of political consultants these days.
But back to the timing of this curious piece of Capitol scuttlebutt: Why, oh, why would a freshman Senator, just a few weeks beyond his first session in office announce his intentions to run for re-election so far from his appointed performance revue with Wisconsin voters? The subtext of the rest of the article seems to suggest Johnson's desperate to fend off being marginalized on account of his own irrelevance:
Unlike most of his Senate colleagues, Johnson came to the upper chamber without any prior experience holding elected office. Before running for office, he spent 31 years building a plastics manufacturing business.
His direct approach to policy problems sometimes seems to clash with the culture of the Senate, where the culture of doing business is often circuitous.
For this reason, some Republican lobbyists thought he might retire after one term. “There was a lot of talk that he wasn’t going to run again, that he would walk off into the sunset,” said one GOP source.
Whomever dropped that quote did so with tongue planted firmly in cheek. That lobbyist wasn't passing along idle K Street gossip, he was using the media as a conduit to make a recommendation to Senator Johnson: lobbyists aren't speculating that he'll ride off into the sunset, they're hoping he'll do so. That's a bad sign, and by making his intentions to run again so early, Johnson seems to be proving the lobbyists point.
Every incumbent politician is constantly running for re-election every day that he or she is in office. That's part of the job, but part of the trick to doing that job well is at least keeping up the appearance that they really aren't running for re-election at all, that they are making the tough decisions based on conviction and informed opinion and extensive research and not, you know, politics. Now that Johnson has made his intention to run for re-election clear so early it will be next to impossible to view any of the decisions he makes for the remainder of his term in office as anything other than part of a re-election strategy.
Johnson keeps on insisting that he wants to have a genuine policy discussion about the issues, but he's made that conversation all but impossible now because when given the choice between horse race politics and "serious" policy discussion voters and the media will always gravitate toward the ponies. This little stunt isn't going to convince his colleagues that he's going to be around for the long haul; in fact, it'll likely make him even less relevant because it's just lousy politics. (Besides, Johnson not very good at serious policy discussions either, as anyone who saw his, er, "conversation" with Paul Krugman this morning discovered.)
Johnson clearly is not enjoying his time in Washington. His approval numbers haven't budged from the mid-30s almost since the day he took office. (Tammy Bladwin's figures are almost 10 points higher.) The GOP bench in Wisconsin is rather deep, so don't be surprised if he has a change of heart in the next four years.
A couple of weeks ago, Senator Johnson spoke wot the MJS's Washington bureau chief, Craig Gilbert, and various issues involving Johnson's transition into his second session of congress, including the reshuffling of his committee assignments. One passage of the discussion is particularly worth noting:
[L]ast month Johnson left his biggest committee assignment - appropriations - and joined the foreign relations panel...
[...]
Johnson said in an interview this week that he left appropriations because he got tired of being one of the only members routinely opposing spending bills.
"Most of the votes we had in committee I was losing 29-1 or 28-2," says Johnson, who also serves on the Budget, Commerce, Small Business and Homeland Security panels.
I'm absolutely baffled that the Senator thought it would be a good idea to either a.) admit this, or b.) spin his departure from the committee in this way. Regardless of which option one chooses, he's basically saying, "Yeah, I saw I had a really tough job ahead of me, so I quit."
People might not like politicians, but we still want them to be fighters. We admire tenaciousness and perseverance, especially against long odds and/or in the service of lost causes. William Proxmire spent 12 years handing out his famous Golden Fleece Awards. It took Russ Feingold almost 10 years to pass his idea of campaign finance reform through Congress. Expecting anything to happen overnight in the Senate, especially from one of the body's most junior members, is a bit unreasonable.
He complained the minority had little real power, and his anti-spending votes often placed him in the minority of the minority. Johnson was also the only Republican on the panel who wasn't a "ranking member" (meaning the designated lead senator for his party) on any of the appropriations subcommittees.
The only way one really becomes a ranking sub/committee member on one of, if not the, most sought after committees in the Senate is seniority. This may be contrary to Johnson's experience on the Homeland Security committee (where he is a ranking member of the subcommittee on Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia), but the statures of the two committees are completely different. If you want power in the Senate, you have to wait your turn.
Presumably, based on the other notable passage in Gilbert's piece, Johnson intrinsically understands this:
Given his frustrations over federal spending, the outcome of the 2012 election and his party's minority status in the U.S. Senate, Johnson was asked whether he expected to seek a second term.
"I'm certainly taking the steps to do so," he said.
Yet given that the word "frustration" is almost never absent from any article about Johnson, it's not difficult seeing him quit the Senate all together when the chance comes.
Personally, I would looooooooove to hear Krause's wacky and humorous take on "the negro problem" in America and encourage him to grace us all with his thoughts on the matter forthwith.
In case you didn't notice, Sen. Ron Johnson had his worst week since moving to Washington last week. His antics during the Foreign Relations committee Benghazi hearings transformed him from being a back-bencher no one had heard of into the subject of snickering and ridicule around the Beltway.
In the past we've pointed to Johnson's inability to surround himself with a knowledgeable staff for a lot of the problems that have befallen his tenure in the Senate and this post will be no exception. We're admittedly little late to this story, but it's still worth commenting on. Apparently, sometime in early December, Johnson made his then-state director Tony Blando his new Chief of Staff, replacing then-acting Chief of Staff Ken McKay who had filled the gap since Johnson's first Chief of Staff, Don Kent, departed in early October. (Got all that?)
This is an incredibly bad decision.
Being a Senate Chief of Staff requires a fairly extensive skill set that can only be acquired on Capitol Hill. It's a gig that demands strong connections to other Senate offices, solid relationships with leaders in the House, vast reservoirs of goodwill among the press corps, reliable ties to important parts of the federal bureaucracy and a finger on the pulse of K Street. The only way to earn these kinds of credentials is by being in Washington. That's why when one examines the resumes of most Senate Chiefs of Staff one often find decades of Capitol Hill experience.
Blando has zero Washington experience. None. In fact, he's only had a little over 2 years of total political experience, most of which has been spent as Johnson's state director. That's not an unimportant job, but it will do him little good in Washington where no one knows him. The only qualification Blando really has to be in charge of a Senate office is the trust of the Senator. This is usually a good thing, but in Senator Johnson's case it's actually counterproductive. Here's why.
As the Benghazi hearings demonstrated, Ron Johnson's political instincts suck. Right now, the most important function any of his staff members can offer their employer is to say "no" -- and no person is in a better position to offer this kind of harsh counsel that a chief of staff. Blando is probably not going to be that guy for several reasons. The first is his overall political inexperience. The second is that he and Johnson are on the same page ideologically and are likely to of the same mind as to which fights Johnson should enter (and Johnson clearly hasn't learned which fights to pick yet). Lastly, but certainly not least importantly, most Senate Chiefs of Staffs are able to operate with a certain degree of swagger, confident that should they ever run foul with their current employer, they will be able to quickly find a job in another office or at a lobbying firm. Blando doesn't have that kind of job insurance.
This last point is extremely important. Senators have raging egos that are feed by Washington's legions of sycophants. The unique kind of "job security" that Chiefs of Staff enjoy allow them to tell their bosses "no" without the threat of derailing their careers. Blando won't enjoy that kind protection. In fact, Blando's power in the Senate is almost entirely dependent on keeping one person, Ron Johnson, happy. That power dynamic is a recipe for creating a Yes Man, which is not the kind of staffer the GOP leadership likely wants aiding a Senator whose political instincts suck.
Further complicating Blando's promotion is the fact that, by all accounts, he has a friendly personal relationship with Johnson, one that developed prior to both men's entrance into the political arena. That will make Blando difficult to fire if or when such an action becomes warranted or necessary. Both men will be returning to Oshkosh when their Excellent Washington Adventure concludes and if folks in DC thought it was awkward running into unemployed old co-workers at the Safeway in Georgetown, just try doing the same at the Pick'n'Save on Murdock Avenue in Oshkosh.
The bottom line is that Blando will likely be Johnson's Chief of Staff for the remainder of the Senator's term in office. His promotion concludes a transition period in Johnson's office that has lasted about a year and one that marks the conclusion of Johnson's slow descent into a full-blown bunker mentality. Johnson simply does not trust anyone in Washington and this is making it almost impossible for him to have any hope of doing his job. The people he does trust, who all seem to have come along for the ride from Oshkosh, have not proven to be up to the task. Worst of all, Johnson doesn't seem to have made this connection yet.
That means more episodes like the Benghazi hearings are just over the horizon.
This afternoon we took a look at the optics of Senator Ron Johnson's exchange with Hillary Clinton at the Benghazi hearing, but after Johnson published his little piece recapping the discussion tonight, we just couldn't help examining the substance of the dialog.
First, to the video. Here's the whole uncut conversation. Note the obvious hostility on Johnson's part from the very beginning. He can't even get through the obligatory pleasantries without sounding, at best, perfunctory.
In our minds their is little question that Johnson comes off looking much, much worse in the extended C-SPAN director's cut then he does in the cable TV edit. A lot of this probably has to do with the camera angles -- high on Clinton and lowish on Johnson -- but even more of it involves the steady way the tension between the two builds and builds before finally coming to a boil in the last minute.
Then we read Johnson brief op-ed published in USA Today late Wednesday night. The article is full of factual errors about the event that seriously make us wonder if Johnson was paying any attention at all to Clinton's answers. His recall of events that not only happened just 12 hours earlier, but are easily available in video form online, is almost delusional. We'll show you what we mean, line by line.
During her Senate testimony, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that approximately 25 Americans who were on the ground or who witnessed the terrorist attack in Benghazi were immediately evacuated.
That's not what she said at all. Clinton said that between 25 and 30 people were evacuated from the Benghazi compound. Johnson asks the question at 1:46 and Clinton answers "The numbers are a little hard to pin down because of our other friends ... Approximately 25 to 30." Despite the fact that Clinton specifically included "our other friends," presumably local militia or other people employed at the consulate, among the evacuees, Johnson erroneously claims they are Americans.
Had Johnson read the ARB report, even the declassified version (see page 19), he would have known there were 7 Americans in the consulate when the assault began. We're only through the first sentence and already Johnson is playing fast and loose with the facts.
Secretary Clinton also revealed that neither she, nor her senior people, debriefed or spoke with those people immediately after the attack, or for months afterward, to understand what happened. She stated that she didn't want to be later accused of playing politics.
The word "debrief" was never used by either Johnson or Clinton during the hearing, though Clinton did imply a debriefing occurred when she mentions the FBI interviewing evacuees. (This detail is a bit tricky, however, as we'll see below.)
When I questioned her about the misinformation disseminated for days by the administration, most notably by Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on Sunday news programs five days after the attack, she asked, "What difference does it make?"
That's not quite how it happened:
Johnson accuses Amb. Rice of "purposefully misleading" the public at 2:40. Clinton talks about tending to the injured evacuees until 3:40 -- remember this: it's an important detail worth Clinton discussing at length -- when she says that the American public was being provided with information that had been vetted by the intelligence community.
The Secretary talks about the fluidity of the situation until 4:10 when she's interrupted by Johnson, who asks his phone call question ... even though Clinton has basically spent the last 90 seconds explaining to the Senator that she did not make such a call to prevent politicizing the debriefing.
Hillary, clearly growing tired of the exchange by now, gamely continues to answer, but is again interrupted at 4:34 when Johnson dismisses her answer as an excuse. There's a few seconds of cross talk before Clinton refers Johnson to the Accountability Review Board (ARB) reports at 4:44.
She begins to differentiate between what is currently known and not known about the incident -- as in today, January 23rd, four months after the event -- when Johnson again interrupts her at 4:57 to reiterate his belief -- sans any evidence -- that the public was intentional misled about protests being the genesis of the consulate siege, saying that the American people could have known that "within days" of the attack, etc.
Finally, at 5:15; 2 minutes, 35 seconds and several interrupted attempts to answer the question later; Hillary has enough.
So it's a long way from Johnson's question to Clinton's answer.
If you don't expeditiously debrief the people who witnessed the attack, how can you understand who initiated it, what weapons they used and who may have been involved? How do you initiate a proper response if you don't know what transpired? How do you move properly to protect other American assets and people in the region? How do you know what failures occurred, so that you can immediately correct them, if you have not debriefed the very victims of those failures? And lastly, how do you tell the truth to the American people if you don't know the facts?
Except Clinton specifically says that the FBI "immediately" went to interview the evacuees at 3:15, rendering this entire graph pointless.
What Johnson's "phone call" meant at the morning hearing evolved several times over the course of the day. At the hearing it seemed like little more than public relation fact-checking exercise. Latter that morning it became a kind of mark of good character. In the early afternoon, it seemed to have something to do with Osama bin Laden. During happy hour is was about everything! But by dinner time Johnson settled on it being a bona fideprofessional intelligence-gathering technique when he referred to it as a "debriefing."
During the hearing Johnson says the following at 2:17: "The point I'm making is that a very simple phone call to these individuals could have ascertained immediately that there was no protest prior to this. I mean this attack started at 9:40 PM Benghazi time ... but then I'm going back to, again, Ambassador Rice, five days later going on the Sunday shows and, what I would say, purposefully misleading the American public."
Here's the thing: it's more than likely that such a phone call wasn't possible; that no one would have been on the other end to answer. Here's what ARB report says (page 27+):
At approximately 0630 local, all U.S. government personnel evacuated [the consulate] with support from a quasi-governmental Libyan militia. They arrived at the [Benghazi] airport without incident.
Evacuees, including all wounded personnel, departed Benghazi on the chartered jet at approximately 0730 local. Embassy Tripoli staff, including the Embassy nurse, met the first evacuation flight at Tripoli International Airport. Wounded personnel were transferred to a local hospital, in exemplary coordination that helped save the lives of two severely injured Americans.
[...]
At 1130 local, September 12, 2012, the Libyan government-provided C-130 evacuation flight landed in Tripoli with the last U.S. government personnel from Benghazi...
In coordination with the State Department and Embassy Tripoli, the Department of Defense sent two U.S. Air Force planes (a C-17 and a C-130) from Germany to Tripoli to provide medical evacuation support for the wounded. At 1915 local on September 12, Embassy Tripoli evacuees, Benghazi personnel, and those wounded in the attacks departed Tripoli on the C-17 aircraft, with military doctors and nurses aboard providing en route medical care to the injured. The aircraft arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base at approximately 2230 (Tripoli time) on September 12, just over 24 hours after the attacks in Benghazi had commenced.
Unfortunately, this next step requires some gruesome arithmetic. The ARB report says that there were seven Americans at the compound when the attack started. Four were killed during the attack. Two were "severely injured," one of who so badly that he is still apparently at Walter Reed Hospital. If the other person was anywhere nearly as "severely injured" as his colleague, it stands to reason that neither were in any physical condition to be debriefed until days, if not weeks, after the incident. That leaves only one American who was at the Consulate when the attack began remaining left to be debriefed, and the report is (intentionally) vague about his or her well-being upon evacuation.
We're suggesting that the declassified version of the ARB report insinuates that of the Americans who were at the Consulate when the attack began, the three survivors were so wounded that they were in no position to be debriefed until much later -- days, if not weeks.
So why didn't Hillary bring this up? Well, she did. It's how she began answering Johnson's question about "misleading the American public." Johnson didn't seem to care for that explanation, so he tries to cut in at 3:14, but Clinton keeping moving on and even goes on to address the allegation that Clinton, Rice or anyone else in the administration "purposely misled" anyone. That's sort of the prelude to all hell breaking loose.
The conclusion of Johnson's piece is, as usual, a mess:
Our diplomatic forces in Benghazi were denied the security they repeatedly requested for many months before Sept. 11, 2012. Secretary Clinton stated that she was not told of those desperate requests in the most dangerous region in the world. As a result, our people in Benghazi were ill-prepared to repel or avoid that attack, and four Americans were murdered. For many days after the event, the American people were also misinformed as to the nature and perpetrators of that attack.
That Johnson should equate the deaths of four American foreign service officers in the line of duty with Johnson's imagined conspiracy is as insulting to their memory as it is craven and demeaning to just about any discussion.
In truth, Benghazi is a failure of leadership — before, during and after the terrorist attack.
To answer Secretary Clinton, it does make a difference. It matters enormously for the American public to know whether or not their president and members of his administration are on top of a crisis and telling them the truth.
All of this is just lip service. Johnson has no interest in finding 'the truth" about what happened in Benghazi. Most of the answers he purports to seek are actually in the ARB report. Johnson sole interest in Benghazi is for use as a political cudgel. Nothing will convince him that there wasn't a "talking points cover-up" designed to willfully mislead the American public, because, to be perfectly honest, Johnson's epistemology isn't all that different from 9/11 Truthers or other conspiracy theorists in so far as they each share an almost pathological inability to critically examine a brief that comfortably fits into their worldviews. Johnson loathes the Obama Administration, therefore all that they do isn't merely wrong, but criminally so.
Unfortunately, today was the best press day of Johnson's career in politics. Johnson's been trying desperately to earn media exposure like this since being elected to the Senate, but failing miserably, to get attention. Today has likely been the first day of his Washington career that his press secretary had to juggle multiple interview requests, and the lesson he's likely going to walk away from this experience is that people will pay attention to me when he's acting like an asshole.
So the next time Johnson brings up Benghazi -- and it will happen, folks -- let the reporter or the token Democrat on FOX or even Hillary Clinton herself demand Johnson provide evidence to support his theory of a massive Benghazi "talking points cover-up." Anything: an affidavit from a witness, an internal State Department memo, video footage from the consulate. Anything. We already knows no such evidence exists -- we're just really interested in Johnston's explanation as to why that is.
Lastly, we want to point out the massive gulf between the events of the hearing as they are recorded on video for posterity versus Johnson's recollection of those only a dozen hours later. Johnson's own article demonstrates a person who is already confusing important details and forgetting critical facts. Some of his article is downright delusional. If Johnson's memory so poorly serves him over only the course of a work day, then imagine how hard it would be for the survivors of the Benghazi attacks to try and piece together what they witnessed after a full night of ducking enemy fire, the trauma of severe wounds, seeing several of their colleagues killed, and hour after hour of fearing for their lives?
Johnson's preposterous claim that a simple phone call would have straightened any confusion surrounding the Benghazi fiasco is, at best, a profoundly crass attempt to score some political points. At worse, it's an insult to the survivor's resilience. Either way, it doesn't belong in the United States Senate.
Before we get in the weeds of this post, let's first recall a helpful PR tip: Men in power can never appear to lose their temper or become frustrated with women in power. They just can't. They will never fail to walk away from the exchange appearing condescending and arrogant. It may not be fair, but "them's the breaks." This is why Joe Biden was all sweetness and light during his Vice Presidential debate with Sarah Palin in 2008; but glib, dismissive and downright surly during his debate with Paul Ryan last fall. If a man in power raises his voice or loses his cool during a conversation with a woman in power he will come off looking like a bully. Maybe worse.
Someone forgot to remind Ron Johnson of this principle before he met Hillary Clinton this morning. I don't necessarily think that Johnson crossed a line here during his line of questioning, but he certainly did take enough steps toward that line; enough to trigger the alarms of not just Clinton, but more than a few viewers too. The optics were not great for Johnson. To be sure, the garbled initial part of Clinton's answer wasn't very impressive either, but I would guess that more people will connect with her display of emotion than will try and parse her words anyway.
Which brings us back to the substance of Johnson's interrogation. Since almost the end of last September, Johnson's been pounding the Benghazi beat pretty hard, just about as hard as any other issue he's bothered touching during his short time in office. That's fine: there are some big issues to discuss over the incident, like the whether US involvement in Libya is appropriate in the first place? Is the security of our diplomatic missions being adequately addressed? Was the CIA's role in Benghazi compromised and were they the target of the terrorists? What, if any, was Al-Qaeda's involvement in the incident? Is there any connection between Benghazi to the recent events in Mali or the hostage crisis in Algeria; and, if so, does this make North Africa the new hotbed for Islamist extremism? Even a simple walk-through the tick-tock of events on the ground in Benghazi on September 11th would have been helpful. Instead, Johnson decided to focus on the process by which "taking points" were made and disseminated in Washington. This has been Johnson's singular focus from the very beginning, and it hasn't changed regardless of how often his questions have been answered.
(To be perfectly honest, the basic gist of Johnson's questions was so predictable that I'm a little disappointed Clinton didn't have a prepared response. The folks at State should have seen this coming. But that's another issue.)
So let's answer Johnson's question: Why didn't Clinton call up the rescued State Department employees as they were being evacuated from the consulate? Because victims of terrorist attacks need to be debriefed by people who are trained to do that sort of thing, hopefully while the event is still fresh in their memories, precisely so that the intelligence community can reconstruct the incident and determine what the hell actually happened. The end.
But Johnson already knows this ... or at least he should. There are a number of reasons while the official Benghazi story was slow to evolve and they start with CIA's involvement in the consulate and the attack. The White House -- and not just the Obama Administration, but any White House -- should be understandably reticent to reveal aspects of intelligence operations and procedures.
But Johnson already knows this, too (or at least he should); and that's what makes whacking the Benghazi pinata so appealing to him: the White House likely can't provide an adequate public explanation of events without revealing a national security secret or two. Johnson's opponents may not think he's too bright, but it does not take much to realize when you've backed someone into a lose-lose situation. No wonder Johnson's been trying to squeeze blood from the Benghazi stone, even if it means essentially accusing the administration of a cover-up ... something that's already been thoroughly debunked.
Now let's return to the optics of this morning one more time. We've talked about how Johnson's been going out of his way to alienate women voters before (see section #4, waaaaaay at the bottom), but it doesn't look like the Senator's done much to correct the problem. Whatever one may think about the exchange at the hearing this morning, following it up with an interview with Charlie Sykes during which Johnson basically dismissed Clinton's testimony as premeditated "emotional" evasiveness -- as if women aren't accused of being too emotional enough as it is -- will probably not endear him to ovarian electorate.
Sharper readers will notice that even though we just criticized Johnson for his "emotional" theory we praised Clinton for her use of emotion earlier in this post. Does that mean I'm talking out of both sides our my mouth? Nope, and here's why: most women will interpret Johnson's dismissal of Clinton as evoking female "emotional volatility" in general, but that's very clearly not what Clinton was trying to convey with her answer to Johnson's question. She was angry, angry that two dudes like Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul, a pair of men who cumulatively have as much experience in elected office as Clinton does solely at the State Department, were telling her how to do her job ... and in hindsight, no less. (She wasn't the only one.) No one needed to parse her words for Clinton to get that point across.
So we're going to try something new here at the Chief. In order to get infuse some regularity into the posts here, we're going to start something of a book club. Every week we'll read a small chunk and write up a post about it in hopes of generating some conversation. Since this blog mostly focuses on politics we decided to kick things off with The Federalist Papers.
If you don't have a copy, don't worry: the book is in the public domain, which means you can find a copy of the full text any number of places online (like here).
It's like four pages. Everyone's welcome. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how long we're going to sustain this project, but readers being into it will certainly encourage to us carry on.
MORE: We're adding the good old Articles of Confederation into the mix just provide some context.
There's still a fairly massive problem that must needs be addressed: when such a major change in the voting scheme should be implemented.
What I mean is this: typically, changes to laws that effect elected officials don't go live until the next change-over in government. Take the XXVII Amendment to the Constitution, for example, which rather succinctly states "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." This principle tends to guide a lot of in-house rules.
And just like congressional elections, the redistricting thereof is set on a regular schedule: immediately following the census that begins every decade. In other words, if the people of Wisconsin really want to divvy up their electoral college votes, it would appear that they would have to wait after the next redistricting to do so, or 2022 at the earliest. This is what both Maine and Nebraska did when they went to their current split formats: Maine changing from the all-in approach in 1972 and Nebraska doing so in 1992.
This would seem only fair because splitting electoral college votes by congressional district would increase the importance of the redistricting process immensely. Allowing voters the chance to offer input into the new districts would seem reasonable, if not essential, to the legitimacy of any change to the apportionment of EC votes. Changing the rules of the game so soon after the last census and redistricting process would mean two entire presidential elections in Wisconsin would pass under a cloud of illegitimacy.
But this is probably not going to happen in Wisconsin, not because the state GOP isn't looking for for any way to cling to power they can find -- they most certainly are -- but because the Governor's short term ambitions will likely interfere with the GOP long-term designs to "reform" the electoral college.
Scott Walker is running for President in 2016. We're fairly confident of this. Should he manage to become the GOP's nominee -- we're not confident about that at all -- he'll need to win Wisconsin in order to have an hope at winning the White House, especially if the Democrats are able to keep their current coalition of minority voters active (and you can bet a lame duck President Obama with little else left on his plate will be campaigning madly to do just that). Furthermore, he'll need to win all of Wisconsin's 10 electoral college votes -- not 5, not 7, but all of them -- to have any prayer at the White House. Even losing just three EC votes, which he would be sure to do under a plan to divvy up the state's EC votes by congressional district, represents a significant obstacle to winning the presidency for Walker.
Take, for example, the follow hypothetical scenario: Imagine that the states of Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin will all allocate their electoral college votes by congressional district in 2016. Since there's probably not going to be much change in the geography of the electorate between last November and 2016, we already know a lot about how a 2016 election would play itself out. Had 2012 been swing state congressional district electoral college vote free-for-all, Mitt Romney would have still lost 271-267, according to my admittedly very quick count. It should be clear just how important those extra three EC votes become under circumstances that can only be considered improbable, but presumably favorable to the GOP, for 2016: they literally mean the difference between a 4-point loss and a 2-point victory. Possible 2016 GOP Presidential nominee Scott Walker would be giving away the White House because he gave away three of his home state's electoral college votes. *
Now, there are undoubtedly a million scenario's wherein Walker's quick sacrifice of a trio of lowly pawns allows him to yell "Mate!" at the end of the game, but each of those hypotheticals ignore ignore a giant looming cloud that would hoover over the chess board ominously, and that's this: retreating to a congressional district EC vote strategy would be another phase in the GOP's march to irrelevance. It would represent a retrenchment to a bunker made up of aging, rural, white male voters at a time when it should be transforming itself for the future to compete with the Democrats multicultural coalition. Catering its messages and policies toward only those areas of the countries where it has a decent chance of winning isn't growing the party, it's shrinking it; and while it may help make Presidential races more competitive in the short term, the long-term consequences can only be considered catastrophic for the GOP.
* To be fair, and even under the very far-fetched fantasy described above, that's assuming the most competitive districts in these six states would have been treated no differently than any other district. In Wisconsin, Romney won the 7th and 8th CDs by a mere 3 and 4 points, respectively; and there were at least 15 other districts that Obama was within 5% of winning: two in Virginia (CD-4, CD-10), at least three in Pennsylvania (CD-3, CD-8, CD-15), at least three in Ohio (CD-10, CD-14, CD-15), three in Michigan (CD-6, CD-7, CD-8), and two in Florida (CD-7 and CD-25). Each of those districts would have been given even more special attention they likely already received during the actual 2012 campaign because they each represent opportunities for any GOP nominee to lose ground to a Democratic rival, but that's a topic for a future post.
Here's a pretty reliable rule of thumb: when Jonathan Krause says he has a "simple solution," the problem is almost certainly more complicated than Krause is capable of fathoming and his proposal will have negligible impact. Case in point: his laughable suggestion that cutting down on take-out and, I don't know, choosing to stay home and masturbate instead of going to the movies will solve the expanding student loan problem in this country.
To begin with he seems to be under the impression that college student are so flush with cash that they have the financial means to buy cars that "will make [one's] co-workers jealous" and spring for lavish long weekends in Vegas, which is patently absurd for the typical college student. It's patently absurd for most recent college grads precisely because they're working off student loan debt. Usually this gets worse during downturns in the economy when hiring is frozen and underemployment is rampant.
What Krause doesn't understand is that the profligate extracurricular spending of students actually has little to do with the explosion in student loans during the last decade, as the chart below explains:
The problem isn't video games, cheeseburgers and orgies in Vegas, as Krause seems to think. It's the cost of tuition, which has been exploding at a rate that's far outpacing wages:
So why is this happening? First off, more people than ever are going to college these days. That's a good thing, but it does come unintended consequences, and one of those is that there's a lot of demand for "good" schools. That means colleges and universities are free to hike up the cost, which is important because most public schools are not getting the funding they once enjoyed, but which are still under immense pressure to demonstrate value for tax-payers' investment.
Part of demonstrating that value is attracting top-notch students and most college administrators have determined that 18 years kids are fairly susceptible to bells and whistles like flashy new buildings. We've seen that here at UW-O, which seems to have constructed more new buildings in the last ten years than it had in many decades prior. Then there's the phenomenon one author calls the "prestige racket," wherein "good" schools try to enter the ranks of "elite" schools simply by increasing the cost of their education product. Yet another element is the growth of for-profit schools which increasingly gobbling up a good chunk of the total student loan pie:
We could on and on with examples -- the fact of the matter is that the student loan bubble is anything but a problem with a "simple solution." The fact of the matter is that a college education is not what it used to be. The value of a college degree has declined while the cost of a diploma has blown up. This is a systemic problem that calls for solutions far more comprehensive and complex than "find a roommate on Craigslist."
People who went to college in the 60's, 70's and 80's enjoyed a far less expensive education than college students do today, and by just about every measure. It's not unreasonable for the kids who are picking up the bill today to be a bit resentful of older generations that got inexpensive degrees, but now don't want to pass on the savings to their kids. To condescendingly demand people with outstanding student loans continue a diet of Ramen noodles for sometimes decades after they leave school betrays an utter lack of understanding of the problem altogether.
The Senator stays on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Budget committees. Neither are especially sexy these days, but nor are they unimportant. (To read about the the massive faux pas Johnson committed whilst on the Homeland Security panel last fall, go here.)
Johnson also moves from the Aging clique to the Small Business huddle. While this seems like a much more logical place for Johnson, the Aging committee does periodicity meddle in Medicare and Social Security affairs -- precisely the kind of entitlement spending Johnson has expressed on numerous occasions he wishes to reform. The Small Business committee -- which, to be perfectly honest, I only found out existed this afternoon -- seems like a kind of Senate Island of Misfits Toys. I gather Mitch McConnell must have been listening all those times Johnson reminded his colleagues that he's really just a small businessman from the Midwest, etc., etc. and finally did something about it when it came to draw up committee assignments.
Johnson was also given a spot on the Foreign Relations committee ... for some reason. International affairs is something Johnson has avoided like the plague in most cases -- save his conspiracy mongering over Benghazi -- and is an area that is clearly out of his wheelhouse. Then again, the entire GOP side of the committee looks like a knee-jerk anti-Model United Nations team.
Foreign Relations is an odd fit for Johnson, especially since it comes at the expense of his seat on the Appropriations Committee, which is usually considered to be the most powerful committee in the Senate. This is a clear step int he wrong direction given Johnson's skill set. Yes, there is a good deal of prestige being on the FR committee, but simply sitting on the committee does not a Washington Greybeard one make. Usually the prestige comes with making dozens of diplomatic and "fact-finding" trips abroad, meeting with hundreds of foreign leaders and befriending them. Johnson seems to have a hard enough time doing that with members of his own party. A seat on the Appropriations committee guarantees the holder a certain measure of power; one can still be ignored on the FR committee, especially since there really isn't much along the lines of high profile diplomacy on the radar during the next congress.
It's difficult to look at these new committee assignments, at least in aggregate, as anything other than a disappointment. They either mark demotions or deployments to places where Johnson can be supervised by GOP Senators who know what they're doing. Senator is being put in his place and that place is on the back bench.
MORE: Forgot one: Commerce, Science and Transportation ... cue the rocket scientist jokes.
"Best New Oshkosh Blog …
The mysterious “JB” was a frequent commenter on other local blogs and the Northwestern Forums before finally realizing that he made sense more than everyone else … [H]e always seems to find amusing things to share with his readers. I check his site daily, twice, to see what he’s got to say."
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