Rotating Congress
In today’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank does a typically brilliant job deconstructing the activities of Congress. He looks at how members of the various defense committees put their energies into fighting for home-state hand-outs rather than focusing on broader defense issues from a national perspective.
The dominance of parochial interests over the general public interest is, of course, a long-standing problem in Congress. Members from cotton-growing states gravitate to the farm committees in order to defend cotton interests, while members from inner cities gravitate to committees overseeing urban affairs to defend programs that subsidize their constituents.
The result is that Congress spends a lot of money on items that don’t have broad public support, and it spends little time actually considering policies from a national perspective.
Americans Want Global Warming Action Now
Dana Milbank has the evidence:
For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference….
But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year’s gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America’s Future Now, but that didn’t prevent a sharp decline in participation. …
Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming.
Democratic Math
As President Obama institutionalizes the permanent campaign, Democrats are using his mailing list and his organization to generate support for his massive spending hikes. Yesterday they announced to the media that they were delivering 642,000 pledges of support for the Obama budget to Capitol Hill. But Washington Post writer Dana Milbank asked a couple of questions and got some interesting answers:
At Democratic National Committee headquarters yesterday morning, party workers were loading minivans with Xerox boxes, each addressed to a different congressional office. It was a classic campaign canvassing operation — except that the next election is 19 months away. “Supporters of President Obama’s Budget to Hand Deliver 642,000 Pledges Gathered from Around the Country to Capitol Hill,” announced the Democrats’ news release.
CNN and the Huffington Post dutifully reported the DNC’s claim of 642,000 pledges. Network cameras and the BBC showed up to film the operation. “We had one of the big printers downstairs smoking last night,” party spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.
In fact, the canvassing of Obama’s vaunted e-mail list of 13 million people resulted in just 114,000 pledges — a response rate of less than 1 percent. Workers gathered 100,000 more from street canvassing. The DNC got to 642,000 by making three photocopies of each pledge so that each signer’s senators and representative could get one.
So they asked 13 million Obama supporters to support Obama’s budget, and got 114,000 responses — which might suggest that even Obama supporters aren’t excited about trillion-dollar deficits farther than the eye can see. And then they counted each one they did get three times to get a good number for the press release, which some of the media bit on. I wonder — if I count each tax dollar three times, can I send in $3,000 and have them count it as $9,000? After all, my two senators and my congressman will all get to spend it.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
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