Chris McCleary's blog

Very interesting report by Nikki Gamer on the local Washington, DC NPR station, WAMU 88.5, this morning discussing a new study by Demos.  The Demos report, "The Economic State of Young America," suggests that high costs of education, healthcare and homeownership combined with growing debt and declining incomes are intersecting to make the adage that each generation is better off than the last an increasingly unlikely scenario for the Millennial Generation.  Millennials, the study asserts, may be the first generation to not surpass the living standards of their parents.  Listen to Nikki Gamer's report in Windows Media or Real Audio, or check out a PDF of the study here.

This just further hightlight's NDN's call for our leaders and government to craft a comprehensive agenda which addresses the needs of 21st century America, for more on our efforts visit www.ndn.org.

The response of Warren Buffett, the 77-year-old chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., when asked by Germany's Der Spiegel weekly whether he thinks the U.S. could still avoid a recession.   "Perhaps not in the sense as defined by economists. ... But people are already feeling the effects of a recession," he continued.  He also said that as far as the average person is concerned, it is already here.  "It will be deeper and longer than what many think," he added.

With the Stimulus checks already in many consumers hands, Congress taking steps to address the housing/mortgage crisis, and as the Presidential nominating process finally begins to resolve itself, it seems an appropriate time for our leaders to turn their attention to crafting a comprehensive economic strategy for our future, that makes globalization work for all Americans and addresses the pressing issues of health care and global warming.  We at NDN have been trying to do our part through our Globalization Inititiative and nascent Green Project.

Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported today in his article: "States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School" how official graduation rates reported to the Federal government are often grossly inflated or inaccurate. Many educators, administrators and others attribute this as yet another negative effect of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. NCLB does not measure completion rates appropriately and perversely awards school systems that push underperformers to drop out, thus leaving many children behind, the article reports. The Times had an interesting graphic of the discrepancies between the reported and actual graduation rates:

NDN has been advocating that we need to do more to prepare American students for a flatter, more globalized world, including our most recent, modest proposals: A Laptop in Every Backpack and Tapping the Resources of America's Community Colleges but this article reveals a deeper problem with our education system that was being masked by NCLB and will be surprising to some, but perhaps all too familiar to those students and workers who have been left behind.

The most recent Gallup Poll daily election tracking of the Democratic race shows Clinton gaining a small lead recently (2%). However, the race remains very tight, as is illustrated by the graph below of recent tracking results over the past 4 weeks:

Other findings have both Democrats now running about even with McCain, although McCain (46%) has opened a slight lead over Obama (44%) in the latest results.  For more from the poll, visit gallup.com.  

It is interesting that at no point during this track did Clinton reach or exceed 49% (unlike Obama, who hit 50% twice in the track) and thus it remains to be seen if Obama can regain his lead and build upon it after his powerful speech today on race, or whether Clinton can even reach 50%.

With so much attention on the election this November, it is perhaps easy to forget the recent 2006 elections and how NDN believes that those elections will mark the End of the Conservative Ascendancy.  Over the past few weeks with November 2008 looming ever closer, we've gotten a reminder of the hubris which preceeded the conservative fall in 2006 - that as Simon Rosenberg presciently wrote in September 2005 Absolute Power Corrputs...  

We've seen this narrative continue with yet another recent example of the moral bankruptcy of the conservative movement and how corruption has pervaded every corner of their world: the growing scandal involving Christopher Ward.  Ward, who until recently was the Treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and served as treasurer for dozens of Republican political fundraising committees has alledgedly diverted up to $1Million from the NRCC - although a complete forensic audit is not yet completed - and potentially stolen from the other Republican political fundraising committees he oversaw as well.

The Politico's Patrick O'Connor first reported on this on February 20, 2008 and his update today, written with John Bresnahan, is only the most recent chapter in the ongoing collapse from corruption and failure to govern of the conservative ascendancy.  What might this foreshadow for Senator John McCain in the fall, a candidate who is proudly running as the heir presumptive to the Bush era?  McCain has already signalled that he will walk away from campaign finance reform and abandoned issues like immigration for political expediency... what chapter is next?

On Sunday The New York Times' Kate Zernike and Jeff Zeleny discussed the contradictions between Senator Obama's blockbuster presidential campaign and his B-movie bit-part in the Senate in their article, "Obama in Senate: Star Power, Minor Role" which is part of their series on the presidential candidates called The Long Run. One quote, from Senator Obama himself, illustrates this contradiction quite well:

'“I’ve been very blessed,” Mr. Obama told the crowd [of Washington’s elite at the spring dinner of the storied Gridiron Club] assembled in March 2006. “Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape. Really, what else is there to do?” he said, his smile now broad. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.”'

The article goes on to compare Sen. Obama's "megawatt celebrity" and "multimedia sensation" with his lackluster record, most notably, the fact that there are "few examples of the kind of bipartisan work he advocates in his current campaign." On immigration reform, which is of particular interest to us here at NDN, Sen. Obama joined the bipartisan group led by Senators McCain and Kennedy offering Comprehensive Immigration Reform, "yet when the measure reached the floor, Mr. Obama distanced himself from the compromise, advocating changes sought by labor groups [and] the bill collapsed."

The political reality for Senator (could-be President) Obama is that a Senate voting record would be a potential minefield to his campaign, as has been demonstrated by his campaign's bludgeoning of Senator Clinton with hers (Iraq vote, for example). Yet, in this new phase of the campaign, which Simon discusses in his recent post, there will be more focus on the realities behind the media and campaign personalities of the candidates. Senator Clinton's argument has long been that she has been through this close scrutiny before (but isn't a rerun inevitable and is that anything we want to see: CNN paging Kenneth Starr)? For Obama, this scrutiny will be new and more intense and will continue to ask the question: But could he deliver?

Sen. John McCain's problems with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) haven't gone away.

Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a complaint against McCain for alledgedly violating campaign finance rules by using the potential of public matching funds as collateral for a loan to keep his campaign afloat, but now trying to withdraw from the spending limits attached to those funds. The FEC last week issued a statement that McCain cannot withdraw his request for matching funds because the Commission, which cannot achieve quorum because 4 of the 6 seats are vacant due to an appointments battle between President Bush and the Senate, cannot issue a ruling on his request. Likewise, they cannot issue any rulings on the DNC's complaint against McCain for the same reasons. For more background on this check out my earlier post: Will Campaign Finance Rules derail the Straight Talk Express?

Ultimately, the crux of this issue is the spending limits. If McCain is bound to those limits (as the DNC complaint is seeking to ensure) then his campaign is on the verge of breaching them. Thus, McCain's campaign has a hard choice before them: stop spending money and go dark until the Republican Convention in September, or break the rules, defy the commission and risk a fine and potential imprisonment of campaign officials (although imprisonment is an unlikely outcome). For more on this, check out Daniel Nashaw's article in The Guardian.

So, the broken FEC is McCain's bane and blessing. Without a quorum, they cannot rule on his request to withdraw from the matching funds program creating an ongoing PR problem for him, but it's a blessing because the FEC cannot rule on the DNC's complaint or McCain's likely breach of the spending limits, either. Whatever happens, McCain seems to be abandoning issues central to his political and personal image (integrity and campaign finance) for political expediency. This isn't the first time McCain has sacrificed his integrity and flip-flopped (immigration). Does anyone expect it to be the last?

Yesterday, as if McCain wanted more controversy, Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press reported that "Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, in a letter to McCain this week, said the all-but-certain Republican nominee needs to assure the commission that he did not use the promise of public money to help secure a $4 million line of credit he obtained in November" before being allowed to withdraw from the primary election's public financing system.  According to the article (which you can find on CNN):

"McCain, a longtime advocate of stricter limits on money in politics, was one of the few leading presidential candidates to seek FEC certification for public money during the primaries. The FEC determined that he was entitled to at least $5.8 million. But McCain did not obtain the money, and he notified the FEC earlier this month that he would bypass the system, freeing him from its spending limits. But [...] Mason, a Republican appointee to the commission, essentially said, 'Not so fast.' By accepting the public money, McCain would be limited to spending about $54 million for the primaries, a ceiling his campaign is near. That would significantly hinder his ability to finance his campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in September."

Further complicating the issue is the deadlock between President Bush and the U.S. Senate over the appointment of Federal Election Commission (FEC) members to fill the 4 vacancies on the 6-seat panel.  Lacking a quorum of commissioners to vote on the McCain campaign's request to withdraw from public financing, Chairman Mason (a Republican appointee) has told McCain that he cannot accept his request (and therefore McCain is still bound by the public financing spending limit). 

"At issue is the fine print in the loan agreement between McCain and Fidelity & Trust Bank. McCain secured the loan using his list of contributors, his promise to use that list to raise money to pay off the loan and by taking out a life insurance policy. But the agreement also said that if McCain were to withdraw from the public financing system before the end of 2007 and then were to lose the New Hampshire primary by more than 10 percentage points, he would have had to reapply to the FEC for public matching funds and provide the bank additional collateral for the loan. In his letter to McCain, Mason said the commission would allow a candidate to withdraw from the public finance system as long as he had not received any public funds and had not pledged the certification of such funds 'as security for private financing.'"

Obviously, as McCain struggles to raise money at the same pace as Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton and as he works to solidify his presumptive "nominee" status, a spending limit, which he is about to hit, would be devastating to his campaign, and leave the Straight Talk Express stalled on the tracks until September.

It will be interesting to see the double-talk, legal-speak and political wrangling Sen. McCain employs over the next few days to seek maximum advantage for his campaign by rejecting the public financing and limits he previously championed.  Are we about to see a repeat of the cowardice and political pandering, so inimical to McCain's crafted image, that he displayed on Immigration Reform last year, on the issue of Campaign Finance rules?

Today in the Washington Post, columnist Al Kamen, summarizes in his article Let's Just Say Obama's the Nominee. So, Who's the Running Mate?, what many pundits have been saying "that a victory for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) is at best improbable at this point". Well, one could assert that the punditry and the press have been writing Sen. Clinton's political obituary since Iowa, and some perhaps more full-throatedly than the decorum of an impartial press or an unaffiliated political commentator would honestly allow. I think it is still safe to say (the pundits aside) that you cannot count Senator Clinton out prematurely (as has been proven more than once so far in this campaign) and that the race isn't over till its over. But, Sen. Obama has run the table since March 4th and has (as the article points out) a healthy margin in the aggregate of the popular vote so far, combine this with the increasing pressure to diminish the independence of the Super Delegates and Sen. Obama's supporters heavy lobbying of the same, with the unlikeliness that Michigan and Florida's delegates will have much sway (here and here for Simon's comments on this topic), and Mr. Kamen's hypothetical assertion doesn't seem that improbable. (Though a Clinton comeback is still possible.)

So, who's the running mate? For either Sen. Obama OR Sen. Clinton, as well as Sen. McCain? If you want some handicapping on the Veepstakes before you pick, including Sen. McCain's possible choices, as well as another slant on this topic, then check out the Washington Post's politics blog by Chris Cillizza here. After checking the line, you can send your entry to the Washington Post for a chance to win a t-shirt, or post your Veepstakes pick (for any of the 3 candidates) here in our comments section for a chance to gain our readers regard for your prognosticating ability.

02-28-08 Update: The University of Virginia's seer, Larry J. Sabato, gazed into his Crystal Ball and delivers his analysis of McCain's potential Veepstakes winners: Veep! Veep!

National Public Radio's Christopher Joyce reported this morning on the growing concern of investors about "climate risk" (defined as "the liability a company faces if the government slaps a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide companies can emit") and carbon cost.  This is an area we are beginning to explore with our Green Project, (working title) which will position NDN as a bridge between key stakeholders such as the new clean technology community and public leaders as we build a post-carbon economy.  To listen to the NPR report, click here.