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Washington Voters Just Passed the Gun Law Congress Couldn’t

by KindraIQMpdpf Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Most post-election coverage has focused on how Republicans drubbed Democrats in the battle for Congress, but there was another resounding victory on Tuesday worth noting, and it wasn’t a partisan one. Universal background checks for gun buyers became law in Washington state, the first such measure to be passed by popular vote in any state in recent memory.

And popular it was, supported by 60 percent of voters. They agreed that buying weapons at gun shows or on the Internet should no longer be possible without basic regulations. “Our goal has never been about finding a single solution that will end gun violence once and for all,” said Seattle Mayor Ed Murray after Initiative 594 passed. “Instead, our goal has been to enact a sound system of commonsense rules that can, by working in concert, make an enormous difference.” Murray noted that states with expanded background checks—now 18 of them, plus Washington DC—have fewer women killed in domestic violence situations, fewer law enforcement officers shot, and fewer suicides with firearms. The editors of the Seattle Times said the wide margin of victory showed that “voters feel the grim, relentless toll of gun violence.”

It was fresh on their minds. Public gun rampages—which tend to draw outsized media attention—have been on the rise the last several years, with the latest taking place at a Seattle-area high school on October 24. Three victims died, two others were gravely injured, and the perpetrator shot himself to death, as so many of them do. Local polling right at that time appeared to show an increase in support (which had already been strong) for I-594. The last time a similar measure was passed by popular vote was in Colorado in 2000, in the wake of the Columbine massacre. (It’s worth noting that the hardcore gun lobby’s opposition in Colorado back then included the same strain of Nazi rhetoric that was trotted out in Washington state this time.)

Washington state’s vote was the clearest electoral test yet beyond Congress for the gun-reform movement that rose out of the devastation at Sandy Hook Elementary School two years ago. Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by former congresswoman and mass shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords, both devoted major funds and other strategic assets to the fight. The primary stated goal of these groups is to function as a formidable counterweight to the National Rifle Association and its political influence; if the passage of I-594 (as well as the defeat of a counter initiative) is any indication, they’ve gained some serious momentum in their less than 24 months of existence. Everytown now has 2.5 million supporters, according to the organization’s former executive director Mark Glaze. “The movement now has plenty of money and plenty of talent, and that’s a big difference from just a few years ago,” Glaze told me on Wednesday. “As the NRA will tell you, intensity trumps money much of the time. In this case they lost on both counts.”

The NRA and its allies also spent millions on the fight—and feared the outcome they now face. “We are very concerned that Bloomberg’s group will replicate this and we will have ballot initiatives like this one across the country,” a NRA spokesperson told The Olympian just prior to the vote.

The gun lobby has long tapped allies in statehouses to block firearms regulations, but the Washington experience may have just revealed a potent threat to that modus operandi. Next up? Glaze says Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, and Maine are strong prospects. Ballot initiatives tend to be expensive (and aren’t allowed in all states), but expanded background checks look to be a solid bet, consistently drawing overwhelming support in national polls. Circumventing state legislators may not be the easiest route, notes Glaze, “but when a majority of people want something badly enough, they can still get it.”

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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Washington Voters Just Passed the Gun Law Congress Couldn’t

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

by LucaDavison Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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States and localities nationwide voted yesterday on a host of hot-button food and agriculture issues, from GMO labeling to soda taxes to food stamps. The outcomes of these contests have major implications for policy—and your dinner plate. Here’s a roundup of how they shook out:

Colorado Proposition 105: This statewide ballot initiative pushed for the labeling of genetically modified foods, requiring most GM foods to bear a label reading, “produced with genetic engineering.” Burrito chain Chipotle and Whole Foods came out in support of the measure, while agribusiness giants Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kraft came out against it. (Unsurprisingly, 105’s opponents raised more than $12 million—many times what supporters brought in.) Outcome: Colorado voters resoundingly rejected Prop 105, with nearly 70% of voters voting no.

Oregon Measure 92: This ballot measure was nearly identical to Colorado’s, requiring foods with GMO ingredients to be labeled. Like in Colorado, Big Ag mobilized big-time against Measure 92, raising more than $16 million. But 92’s supporters—including Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—raised an impressive $8 million. Outcome: Undecided

San Francisco Measure E and Berkeley Measure D: These two Bay Area cities both considered levying taxes on sugary beverages. San Francisco’s Measure E proposed a two-cent per ounce tax, while Berkeley’s Measure D proposed one-cent per ounce. Both races were considered something of a last stand for the soda tax—if it couldn’t pass in these two bastions of liberalism and healthy living, it was essentially doomed everywhere else. No surprise, then, that Big Soda spent more than $7 million in San Francisco and over $1.7 million in Berkeley (population: 117,000) to defeat the measures. Outcome: Failing to gain the necessary two-thirds supermajority, the San Francisco soda tax failed. Berkeley’s is undecided.

Maui County, Hawaii, GMO Moratorium Bill: Hawaii’s Maui County—which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai and Molokai—considered one of the strongest anti-GMO bills ever: a complete moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe. Agriculture is big business on Maui: the island is a major producer of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple, among other things. Monsanto is among the companies operating farms in Maui County, and this bill would’ve effectively shut it down. (Under the law, farmers knowingly cultivating GMOs would get hit with a $50,000 per day fine.) Opponents raised nearly $8 million against the measure, making it the most expensive campaign in state history. Outcome: Undecided

Florida Second Congressional District: Rep. Steve Southerland, a tea party darling, faced Democrat Gwen Graham in his attempt to get re-elected in this Florida Panhandle district. Last year, Southerland attempted to pass legislation that would’ve cut $39 billion in food stamp funding, forcing millions out of the program. (He called the cuts “the defining moral issue of our time.”) Widely considered the most sweeping cuts in decades, they were not passed, and made Southerland an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Outcome: In a rare House flip for Democrats, Rep. Southerland was defeated by Democrat Gwen Graham.

Kansas Senate: Pat Roberts, the three-term Republican Senator from Kansas, faced independent challenger Greg Orman in a surprisingly tight race for this deep-red state. The race was considered a key indicator of the GOP’s Senate hopes, and important for agriculture too: Roberts had said that in the event of a Republican majority, he would be Senate Agriculture Committee Chair—given that he won his own contest, of course. Roberts, once considered a “savior” of food stamp programs, attempted to cut $36 billion from the program last year, and would certainly advocate for similar policy as chairman. Outcome: Roberts won re-election, and the GOP won the Senate majority. Look for Chairman Roberts in 2015.

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

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Sam Brownback Holds On

by JeffreyBaylebri Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sam Brownback lives to see another day. The embattled Kansas governor won his reelection bid, defeating Democrat Paul Davis. Polls headed into Tuesday had given Brownback poor odds for retaining his job, but being on the ballot during a horrendous year for Democrats nationwide proved to be enough for Brownback to hold on.

Four years ago Brownback coasted into the governors mansion by 30-points. But during his first-term in office he drove moderate Republicans out of his party in order to implement one of the steepest state-level tax cuts in history. Since then, tax revenues have dropped precipitously and the state’s credit rating has been downgraded. The next session of the state legislature will likely have to enact sweeping budget cuts or revoke Brownback’s tax cuts, an unlikely scenario now that he’s maintained his job.

Davis ran a quiet campaign, banking on dissatisfaction with the incumbent rather than running a proactive campaign laying out his own vision. A campaign based on being Not Sam Brownback didn’t prove to be enough in the end.

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Sam Brownback Holds On

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Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

by BonitaYuranigh Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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“The first question I ask my customers is: Are you registered?” Jolanda Smith says.

Smith runs a hair salon on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her hair is dyed lavender and her arms are covered in heart and shooting-star tattoos. In the lead-up to the midterms, she’s lending her storefront to Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s reelection campaign. Smith passes out sample ballots and flyers and tells customers how to register and where their polling location is. Last Saturday morning, she was talking God and voting as she straightened a customer’s hair.

“It’s: Are you gonna vote, yes or no?” she says, sectioning off a lock of hair and pulling it through the iron. “God gave us a choice, and the choices are always yes or no. It’s not maybe. It’s not, ‘Let me think about it,’ ’cause those are excuses…on down from choosing Christ to voting. You gonna vote? Yes or no?”

IN 2013, North Carolina Republicans, led by Hagan’s opponent, state house speaker Thom Tillis, passed a far-reaching voting law that curtails early voting and eliminates same-day registration. The Justice Department sued North Carolina over the law, charging it was discriminatory and would depress minority turnout.

Hagan’s campaign knows that black voter turnout could decide her fate—and, by extension, determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of President Barack Obama’s term. If African-Americans manage to turn out at presidential-year levels—if they’re at least 21 percent of the electorate—Hagan will probably win, says Tom Jensen, director of the North Carolina-based polling firm Public Policy Polling.

That’s why the Hagan campaign, and its coordinated get-out-the-vote organization Forward North Carolina—along with the NAACP, state Democrats, and get-out-the-vote outfits—launched unprecedented efforts this year to mobilize black voters.

Those efforts are paying off. On the first day of early voting last week, 76-year-old Ruben Betts was sitting on the curb in a shopping center parking lot wearing an “I just voted” sticker on his sweater. The president reminded him to vote this year, he says: “Obama sent me a letter.” As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That’s up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

The Hagan field operation, which has 40 offices, 100 staffers, and 10,000 volunteers, is the largest that North Carolina has ever seen in a Senate race. By comparison, the get-out-the-vote campaign for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall’s failed Senate bid in 2010 was almost entirely run by volunteers. “We had no money, I mean no money,” says Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant who helped coordinate Marshall’s field operation. “And maybe five paid staffers. The difference in what they’ve got now—it’s just not even same thing. There’s no comparison.”

Democrats have spent $1 million on ads aired on black radio stations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus this month to send black lawmakers on a bus tour through North Carolina and five other battleground states. And Hagan’s campaign is collaborating extensively with black clergy across the state and roughly 150 black small business owners like Smith who are helping turn out voters this year.

Smith says the main issue that convinces her customers to go to the polls is health insurance. (North Carolina didn’t expand Medicaid, so about 500,000 poor North Carolinians are still without insurance.) Jobs top the list, too. Smith’s shop sits on Murchison Road, one of the main drags leading out of Fayetteville. The further you drive from the town center, the less money there is—the storefronts become more faded, the sidewalks get weedier, the landscape grayer. “It’s hard to get a job even if you have a degree,” she says.

Smith adds that anger over the August shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, will also bring people in her community out on Tuesday. “It was more than just him,” she notes, referring to the police brutality she witnesses regularly in her community. “You have some in the system that say, ‘I’m gonna hide behind this badge and use it for injustice instead of justice’…To us it feels like it’s racist.”

T-omnis Cox says he feels like a potential Michael Brown. A 23-year-old who works at a chicken plant in eastern North Carolina, he was hanging out in front of a corner liquor store in Goldsboro last Thursday evening. “It’s hard out here in the world,” he says. “Every day, we’re ducking from cops, we’re ducking from law.” Cox says he’s going to vote for Hagan because “Republicans don’t care about the poor.”

Hagan’s campaign has also reached out to African-American churches as a key component of its voter mobilization effort, urging pastors around the state to help with voter education and registration.

The Rev. Dumas Alexander Harshaw Jr. says his church in downtown Raleigh, First Baptist—which was founded by freed slaves—has always been political. This election cycle, the church has been helping voters register, and handing out sample ballots as well as guidelines on how and where to vote. Last Sunday, Harshaw invited Dr. Everett Ward, the president of St. Augustine’s University, a historically black college in the city, to speak to the members of First Baptist about voting.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Ward tells the congregation, referring to the slew of policies Tillis and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature have enacted since 2012 that disproportionately harm minorities. “It had the same title in 1895, in 1958, in 1968: ‘The South Shall Rise Again.'” A few amens rise from the pews. If North Carolina sends Tillis to Washington, Ward continues, “we will lose more opportunity for upward mobility, access to healthcare will disappear, access to higher education will disappear.”

So go vote, he says. “Throughout history…When our people faced discrimination and injustice, we answered the call.”

“Will you go?” Ward asks the congregation, and the chapel fills with “Yes.” “Will you go?” “Yes.”

Not everyone needs to be convinced to exercise their civic duty. “People died so I might have the right to vote,” says Mary Bethel, who is lending her Fayetteville storefront to Hagan’s ground campaign. Last Friday afternoon, she sat at her desk among stacks of papers, envelopes, Post-its and grandchild photos in her small tax shop on Murchison Road, wearing bright red lipstick and lightly smudged glasses. “My parents voted til the day they died,” she adds. “I grew up in segregation. I vote every election.”

Tillis’ record as A leader of the unpopular state Legislature has made it easier for people like Smith and Ward to get black voters to the polls. “Kay Hagan, to me she’s wishy-washy, she’s two-faced. But Tillis is an out-out crook,” says Michael Curtis, a 65-year-old unemployed former construction worker who lives in Raleigh. Democrats haven’t done much for Curtis—he’s been out of a job since Obama was elected, and says he doesn’t have health care—but he’s still voting Hagan. Last year, Tillis voted against expanding Medicaid in North Carolina, which would have provided coverage to a half million uninsured North Carolinians. Tillis led a GOP push to cut funding for substance abuse treatment centers by 12 percent. In 2013, he and his fellow Republicans slashed unemployment benefits for 170,000 North Carolinians and eliminated the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, while cutting taxes for rich people. And Tillis backed the harsh voter suppression law, too.

These bills and others Tillis and fellow Republicans forced through after they took control of both the legislature and the governorship in 2012 led the NAACP’s Rev. William Barber to launch the Moral Mondays movement in April 2013. For 74 straight weeks now, protesters have held demonstrations near the state capitol demanding a retreat from the state’s sharp right turn.

Now the NAACP is harnessing that anger to get voters to the polls in the most massive mobilization effort the group has ever made in a non-presidential year. Last Thursday, the first day of early voting in the state, the NAACP led 32 marches to the polls—more than in any previous midterm year. Barber’s organization is also calling all of the 286,000 African-Americans who voted in 2012 and 2008 but didn’t vote in 2010, helping register thousands of new voters, buying radio ads, and reaching out to churches. “African-Americans need to vote because we’re the ones who know the most about voter suppression,” Barber told Mother Jones.

If Hagan loses, though, it won’t be African-Americans’ fault. It will be because too many centrist Democrats voted Republican, Barber says. There are 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina, many of whom are white. “You don’t lay the blame of this election on black people.”

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Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

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Why Do Republicans Hate the Beatles?

by AbrahamCorbett Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at the Facebook Data Science blog, Winter Mason shows us how personal likes and dislikes line up with political ideology. Democrats like Maya Angelou, The Color Purple, and The Colbert Report. Republicans like Ben Carson, Atlas Shrugged, and Duck Dynasty. It’s all good fun, though I’m a little mystified about why the Empire State Building is such a Democratic-leaning tourist destination. Maybe Republicans just dislike anything related to New York City.

But it’s music that I want some help on. I get that country tends to be right-leaning and Springsteen is left-leaning. But what’s up with the Beatles being so distinctively associated with liberals? It’s no secret that I know squat about music, so help me out here. No snark. I thought the Beatles had long since ascended into a sort of free-floating state of pop elder statehood where they were beloved of all baby boomers equally—and pretty much everyone else too. What do I not know that accounts for continuing Republican antipathy toward the moptops?

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Why Do Republicans Hate the Beatles?

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

by Florencia4409 Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three months ago, John Boehner threw a bone to the tea-party faction that was nipping at his heels and demanding action against the lawless tyrant Obama and his executive orders that routinely defied both the Constitution and the duly enacted laws of the land. The bone took the form of a planned lawsuit against the administration because it had delayed certain aspects of the employer and employee mandates under Obamacare.

At the time, I was perfectly OK with Boehner doing this. Why not let courts decide this kind of dispute, after all? That’s what they’re for. What’s more, unlike most of the tea party complaints about lawless behavior, this one seemed at least defensible. And yet, three months later, we still have no lawsuit. Why? Simon Lazarus and Elisabeth Stein suspect that it has to do with Boehner asking for some legal advice from the Congressional Research Service and then quietly getting a report that he wasn’t expecting:

CRS reports such as this one are generated in response to requests by members or committees of Congress, though the CRS does not make public the identity of the requester or requesters. This particular report — of which House Democrats were unaware until it appeared — bears the earmarks of an inquiry, requested by the Speaker or his allies, to give some color of legitimacy to their charges of rampant presidential illegality. Instead, the result validates the lawyers’ maxim not to ask a question when unsure of the likely answer.

The Report offers two conclusions: First, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), no rulemaking procedure was necessitated by the Administration’s initial one-year delay in enforcing the employer mandate, past the ACA’s prescribed January 1, 2014 effective date….Second, the Report states that, when, in February 2014, the Administration announced an additional year’s postponement of full enforcement of the mandate, until January 1, 2016, “informal rulemaking procedures” appeared to be required. In fact, as the report’s authors reference, the Administration had engaged in precisely the type of informal rulemaking process that, the report concluded, was called for. The Administration’s action finalized a September 2013 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, making adjustments in response to comments from interested parties, precisely as prescribed by the APA.

In other words, having been asked whether the Obama administration had crossed all its t’s and dotted its i’s, the CRS’ answer was unequivocal: yes it had. In bland CRS-speak, this seems like a veritable finger in the eye — or perhaps, a blunt warning to the Speaker to drop the lawsuit project.

Oops. This doesn’t mean Boehner can’t still file his lawsuit, of course. It was all pretty much symbolism and bone-tossing in the first place, so it hardly matters if he ends up losing the case a year or two from now. But it could have proven embarrassing, especially if the CRS report became public, which, inevitably, it did. This stuff never stays under wraps forever.

So perhaps Boehner has decided to hold his fire. He has bigger fish to fry right now, and I doubt he was ever all that excited about the lawsuit anyway. For now, it’s become just another shard on the ever-mounting bone pile of tea party outrage about a president doing stuff they don’t happen to approve of.

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

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Court Strikes Down Arkansas Voter ID Law

by ConnorT10mv Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s restrictive voter ID law, ruling that it violated the state’s constitution. The unanimous decision, which comes just days before early voting begins in the state, could impact a Senate race considered key to a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Arkansas’ law, enacted in 2013 after the Republican-controlled legislature overrode the Democratic Gov. Mike Beebee’s veto, would have required voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Studies have shown that photo ID laws disproportionately burden minority and poor voters, making them less likely to vote. The state Supreme Court ruled that the voter ID law imposes a voting eligibility requirement that “falls outside” those the state constitution enumerates—namely, that a voter must only be a US citizen, an Arkansas resident, at least 18 years of age, and registered to vote—and was therefore invalid.

The court’s ruling could help swing in Democrats’ favor the tight Senate race between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and his opponent, Republican Rep. Tom Cotton.

After the Supreme Court gutted a section of the Voting Rights Act last year, Republican state legislatures around the country enacted a slew of harsh voting laws. Since the 2010 election, new restrictions have been enacted in 21 states. Fourteen of those were passed for the first time this year.

Arkansas was one of seven states in which opponents of restrictive voting laws filed lawsuits ahead of the 2014 midterms. Last week, the Supreme Court blocked Wisconsin’s voter ID law. A federal court last Thursday struck down a similar law in Texas—only to have its ruling reversed this week by an appeals court. The US Supreme Court recently allowed North Carolina and Ohio to enforce their strict new voting laws.

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Court Strikes Down Arkansas Voter ID Law

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Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

by LudieHuynh Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hedge fund pioneer James Simons during a 2007 interview Mark Lennihan/AP

As Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the Senate, hedge funds are dumping millions of dollars into congressional campaigns. Most of these companies are lining up behind one party or the other. But the second-biggest spender, Long Island-based Renaissance Technologies, is playing both sides of the aisle. As of early September, the firm’s CEO, Robert Mercer, had given $3.1 million to Republican candidates and super-PACs. Its founder and chairman, James Simons—a brilliant former National Security Agency code breaker—had donated $3.2 million to their Democratic counterparts.

Neither man has spoken publicly about his motives, but the donations coincide with at least two federal investigations into Renaissance’s business dealings. In July, Renaissance executives were hauled before a Senate subcommittee and grilled about the company’s use of complex financial instruments to dodge billions of dollars in taxes and skirt federal leverage limits, which protect the financial markets from swings and crashes. As Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) put it during the hearing, “excessive leverage” can “bring down not just a reckless borrower, but the financial institution that lent it money, and that failure can ripple through the entire financial system.”

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Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

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Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

by LeilaniOgden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at Vox, Libby Nelson interviews Jack Schneider, a history professor at College of the Holy Cross, about why Americans think schools are in decline despite the evidence that they’re actually better than they used to be. Here’s Schneider:

The first reason that people think schools are in decline is because they hear it all the time. If you hear something often enough, it becomes received wisdom, even if you can’t identify the source. That rhetoric is coming from a policy machine where savvy policy leaders have figured out that the way that you get momentum is to scare the hell out of people. So reformers have gotten really good at this sky is falling rhetoric….The rhetoric there is the schools are in crisis, we are competing against nations that are going to somehow destroy us if our test scores aren’t high enough, and lo and behold, policymakers have a solution.

Schneider points to a couple of pieces of evidence to back up his contention that schools today are better than in the past. The first is NAEP test scores, which have been generally rising, not falling, over the past few decades. The second is the well-known fact that people tend to think their own neighborhood schools are fine but that schools nationally are terrible. A Gallup/PDK poll confirms this perception gap.

But here’s an interesting thing. Although it’s true that this gap in perceptions is widespread, it’s far more widespread among Republicans than Democrats. Take a look at the chart on the right, constructed from the poll numbers. When it comes to rating local schools, there’s barely any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Only a small number give their local schools a poor grade. But nationally it’s a whole different story. Republicans are far more likely to rate schools as disaster areas nationally.

I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions about this without giving it some serious thought. Still, there’s at least one thing we can say. This difference doesn’t seem to arise from different personal perceptions of education. Both groups have similar perceptions of their own schools.1 So why are Republicans so much more likely to think that other schools are terrible? If it doesn’t come from personal experience, then the most likely culprit is the media, which suggests that conservative media does far more scaremongering about education than liberal or mainstream media. That’s pretty unsettling given the fact that, as near as I can tell, the mainstream media is almost unrelentingly hostile toward education.

But the truth is that I don’t watch enough Fox or listen to enough Limbaugh to really know how they treat education. Is this where the partisan divide comes from? Or is it from Christian Right newsletter circuit? Or the home school lobby? Or what?

In any case, there’s more interesting stuff at the link, and Neerav Kingsland has a response here, including the basic NAEP data that shows steadily positive trends in American education since 1971.

1Or so it seems. One other possibility is that far more Republicans than Democrats send their kids to private schools. They rate these schools highly when Gallup asks, but rate other schools poorly because those are the schools they pulled their kids out of. A more detailed dive into the poll numbers might shed some light on this.

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Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

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Was Obama Naive?

by EstebanHarpster Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman has finally come around to a fair assessment of Barack Obama’s term in office: not perfect, by any means, and he probably could have accomplished more with better tactics and a better understanding of his opponents. Still and all, he accomplished a lot. By any reasonable standard, he’s been a pretty successful liberal president.

Ezra Klein says this is because he abandoned one of the key goals of his presidency:

From 2009 to 2010, Obama, while seeking the post-partisan presidency he wanted, established the brutally partisan presidency he got. Virtually every achievement Krugman recounts — the health-care law, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, the financial rescue, the stimulus bill — passed in these first two years when Democrats held huge majorities in congress. And every item on the list passed over screaming Republican opposition.

….Obama spent his first two years keeping many of his policy promises by sacrificing his central political promise. That wasn’t how it felt to the administration at the time. They thought that success would build momentum; that change would beget change. Obama talked of the “muscle memory” congress would rediscover as it passed big bills; he hoped that achievements would replenish his political capital rather than drain it.

In this, the Obama administration was wrong, and perhaps naive.

This is, to me, one of the most interesting questions about the Obama presidency: was he ever serious about building a bipartisan consensus? Did he really think he could pass liberal legislation with some level of Republican cooperation? Or was this little more than routine campaign trail bushwa?

To some extent, I think it was just the usual chicken-in-every-pot hyperbole of American presidential campaigns. American elites venerate bipartisanship, and it’s become pretty routine to assure everyone that once you’re in office you’ll change the toxic culture of Washington DC. Bush Jr. promised it. Clinton promised it. Bush Sr. promised it. Carter promised it. Even Nixon promised it.

(Reagan is the exception. Perhaps that’s why he’s still so revered by conservatives despite the fact that his actual conduct in office was considerably more pragmatic than his rhetoric.)

So when candidates say this, do they really believe it? Or does it belong in the same category as promises that you’ll restore American greatness and supercharge the economy for the middle class? In Obama’s case, it sure sounded like more than pro forma campaign blather. So maybe he really did believe it. Hell, maybe all the rest of them believed it too. The big difference this time around was the opposition. Every other president has gotten at least some level of cooperation from the opposition party. Maybe not much, but some. Obama got none. This was pretty unprecedented in recent history, and it’s hard to say that he should have been able to predict this back in 2008. He probably figured that he’d get at least a little bit of a honeymoon, especially given the disastrous state of the economy, but he didn’t. From Day 1 he got nothing except an adamantine wall of obstruction.

Clearly, then, Obama was wrong about the prospects for bipartisanship. But was he naive? I’d say he’s guilty of a bit of that, but the truth is that he really did end up facing a hornet’s nest of unprecedented proportions. This might have taken any new president by surprise.

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Was Obama Naive?

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