Arguing from the future: President Obama's legacy considerations

How will President Obama be remembered?

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. - Yogi Berra

Jack Balkin has written a thought provoking piece titled Arguments from the Future'A New Modality of Constitutional Argument. In its context, it is a fascinating piece. For example, discussing Justice Kennedy's upcoming votes on the gay marriage cases, Balkin writes:

I noted that one of the strongest influences on the Justices, and especially Justice Kennedy, was how they believed their decisions would look in in ten or twenty year's time.  Would they be seen as defenders of liberty and equality, or would they be viewed in hindsight as defenders of prejudice, fighting against the tide of progress?

Mark Tushnet has pointed out to me that he believes that someone like Anthony Kennedy is likely to vote for gay rights in the Marriage Cases'or at least not to vote on the merits against gay rights'because he doesn't want to be remembered as being like Henry Billings Brown, the author of Plessy v. Ferguson. Kennedy would rather be remembered as being like Earl Warren, the author of Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively overruled Plessy.

It's interesting to me that Tushnet (and Balkin?) believe that Justice Kennedy has made his prediction for the future regarding gay rights'the wrong side of history is opposing them. I think he is right but I would contrast his views on gay rights and his likely view on voting rights, where he has given indications that he is more than willing to be the fifth vote striking down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. How would that vote look in 10 or 20 years?

In any event, as interesting as these questions are, I think it is even more interesting to consider the question of arguing from the future in other contexts. Consider this passage from Balkin:

There is little doubt in my mind that arguments from the future can be extremely powerful, especially to judges who don't have to worry about keeping their jobs, but might well worry what their legacy will be. Indeed, the less you have to worry about your job security in the present, the more you might tend to worry about the future. (Think about what drives second term presidents, for example.). [Emphasis supplied.]

Yes, let's think about second term Presidents, for example. What can we tell about what President Obama sees as compelling "argument from the future"? What does he believe will be remembered, favorably or unfavorably, from his Presidency and how can he shape his remembered legacy in his second term?

Follow me to the other side to read a few musings on the subject.

Yes, she can...run for office and win

This last election was a very good year for electing Democratic women to national office.

We seated Elizabeth Warren (MA), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Mazie Hirono (HI) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND) in the Senate, and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) will now be serving a full term.

There are new freshwomen in the House:

(AZ)Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema, (CA) Gloria Negrete McLeod, Julia Brownley,
(CT) Elizabeth Esty, (FL)Lois Frankel, (HI) Tulsi Gabbard, (IL) Tammy Duckworth, and
Cheri Bustos, (NV) *Dina Titus, (NH) * Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane Kuster,(NM) Michelle Lujan Grisham (NY) Grace Meng, (OH) Joyce Beatty and (WA) Suzan DelBene.

(* has been in Congress before)

And there is a chance that we will see more bids for the White House made by women, in the years ahead.  

That's the good news.

Here's the bad news.

The United States ranks 77th in the world in women's participation in government.

Oh sure, we do way better than Saudi Arabia which has no women's suffrage, so they rank zero, but 77th?  

That, combined with an all out war on women by our other major Party'the Republicans, means we still have a lot of work to do.  

Let me be more specific.

Just because a politician is female does not mean she is going to represent progressive women's values. This is not about ovaries'it's about empathy. We have the Sarah Palin's and Jan Brewer's and Michele Bachmann's who make that perfectly clear.

Obviously there are also men who are feminists. Without them having voted for our issues and our rights we wouldn't have come as far as we have since women got the right to vote and hold office.

I know this is women's history month but it's just as important to talk about the future. We need to get up off our assets and start building it.

Follow me below the fold to take a look at the research, some action plans and two inspiring stories.

Renters make good Democrats, and other demographic observations

You've probably noticed that it takes certain kinds of congressional districts to elect certain kinds of Representatives. At an instinctual level, you can probably guess that a mostly non-white district in a northeastern city is going to elect a liberal Democrat, and a mostly white district in the rural south is going to elect a conservative Republican. Things get a little more complicated with, say, a middle-class suburban district in the west; that's the kind of place where candidate strength, fundraising, and what the direction the national winds are headed all play a role. But there a lot of other variables that go into shaping a district's makeup, and those variables can tell us something about a district's political potential.

Why talk about this now, with the next election more than a year and a half away? Partly because now is the time when targets get picked and candidates get recruited; competitive races don't usually just pop up out of sheer will but require a lot of groundwork. But more importantly, the Census Bureau finally graced us last month with demographic information for the nation's congressional districts. Although the most recent Census has been in the books for several years now, things got slowed down by the redistricting process (which, of course, relies on the Census' initial population figures); they had to wait until the new district lines were finalized to be able to calculate new district data.

With access to that data, finally, I initially planned to write a piece about the various superlatives in congressional districts (whitest districts! poorest districts! best educated districts! and so on). That's interesting trivia, of course, but by itself doesn't tell us much about how we can reshape the House in 2014 and in future years, so I also decided to pinpoint Republicans in the districts with the demographic categories that seemed most hostile to them (say, for example, the five congressional districts with the highest percentage of African-American residents that are still represented by Republicans).

Rather than put up dozens and dozens of tables, though, that left me wondering: which variables actually matter the most? Which particular demographic categories are most strongly related with whether a district tends to elect a Democrat or Republican? That way, we could focus on only a few most important categories. So, with that in mind, I calculated correlations for each of the categories in the Census' release, factored against the percentage the Democratic candidate for the House got in each district. Some of the results are predictable, but others were a total surprise. Here's a chart of the characteristics that had the strongest positive and negative relationships with Democratic share of the House vote:

Some of the other things that you'd think might matter turn out not to matter much at all. For instance, the correlation coefficient on median household income is only 0.02, meaning no relationship in any direction. (With correlations, 1 or -1 means a perfectly corresponding relationship within the data, while 0 means nothing but random noise.) It's tempting to think of the Republicans as the "party of the 1 percent" and to think of all the Democrats representing blue-collar districts in the cities, but stop and think about the number of affluent suburban districts that elect Democrats, or the number of abjectly poor areas in the Appalachians that elect Republicans.

Follow over the fold for full discussion on why these factors might matter, and the promised lists of Republicans vulnerable according to these criteria ...

Animal Nuz #140

CPAC 2013: Rand Paul wins the CPAC Straw Poll

It's not exactly the most meaningful thing in the world, but Rand Paul took home the honors in this year's CPAC Straw Poll. Among the CPAC attendees, Paul garnered 25% of the vote. Marco Rubio was a very close second at 23%, and Rick Santorum (yes, really) took third with a more mundane 8%.

That's actually maybe a less impressive win for Paul than I would have expected. As those of you who have been following my posts from here at CPAC for the past few days, the audience seems to made up primarily of two groups: young libertarian types on one side, and older tea party types on the other. Given that both those groups have some heavy admiration for Rand Paul, you'd perhaps expect him to run away with the thing. Then again, Rand Paul's primary contribution to American discourse so far has been from his family connection to Paul the Elder and from his recent filibuster performance, so even this is a pretty good showing for a relative political newcomer. (It should also be noted that at one point during today's presentations, a convention organizer at the podium specifically stated, hint-hint, that there's no reason you can't vote more than once in the Straw Poll, and perhaps some people did.)

Again, it shows the split in the party that is very evident here. In announcing the results, In noting that the number of votes cast the last two years have trended modestly down each year (less than 3000 votes were cast this year; I believe event organizers were claiming an overall attendance of 10,000), Tony Fabrizio supposed it was because the conservative movement "hasn't quite come to consensus yet." Rand Paul is the libertarian choice, and has strong support in among the Tea Party. Marco Rubio is the more conventional, party-groomed candidate. Rick Santorum has strong support here from the fundamentalists and outright theocrats (and, apparently, the racists), a smaller but persistently loud minority.

I'm not seeing a link to the full poll results yet, but the results match up pretty closely with my own observations here, which is good because it means I'm not blind or daft, at least not yet. A very dominant 52 percent of Straw Poll voters were from people between 18-25, which matches up with the crowd here; while perhaps half of all attendees aren't in that age range, they definitely make up a good half of the CPAC "core", the diehards who were here from the first moments on Thursday. There were twice as many men voting as women, which Fabrizio says "looks skewed, but isn't that different from previous years." A whopping 70+ percent list their top priority as being "limited government", and roughly the same percentage say that the deficit should be patched through spending cuts alone; only 16 percent say that pairing tax increases with those cuts would deb preferred.

About 50% of the attendees say the United States should step back from global military issues and let our allies "fend for themselves" more often. 86 percent say it's not all right to kill U.S. citizens using drone strikes, and 70 percent say it's not OK to spy on U.S. citizens. So there you go.

The bad news: sadly, the Straw Poll in reality doesn't mean all that much. While the announcers made the point that in the past they've asked the Straw Poll questions to a national sample and gotten pretty much the same results, demonstrating that these samples, too, should be reflective of America, in reality the odds that Rand Paul is going to be the dominant choice for the 2016 campaign are, to put it charitably, probably low.

You can see the full Straw Poll results (PDF) here.

Expect dirty bathrooms and long lines at the Grand Canyon, thanks to sequester

Planning a trip to the Grand Canyon this summer? Thanks to Republicans insisting on sequestration in order to protect corporate tax loopholes, you can expect:

... a two-hour reduction in summer hours at the park's main visitor center, longer processing times for back-country permits and extended lines to enter the park, which has an average 4.38 million visitors a year.

Grand Canyon's restrooms and campgrounds will be cleaned less often, and repairs to damaged trails will take longer, Uberuaga said in a phone interview. Sequestration cut $1.1 million from $21 million in 2012 federal funding. The park has stopped hiring and eliminated staff travel and overtime, except for an emergency, he said.

Have fun, and don't forget to thank a Republican! When you do, please be sure to mention that dirty bathrooms and long lines for travelers aren't just an inconvenience, they're a result of reduced hours and job cuts that will slow the economy.

But, pshaw, forget all that. There is good news for Republican members of Congress, because the cuts to that one thing they care about may be reduced slightly: President Obama is looking for a way to resume White House tours for school groups.

Tell Republicans to quit whining about White House tours and start worrying about the people whose paychecks are being cut.

Sunday Talk: Get your freak on

Every March, millions of conservative activists and thought leaders get dressed up in their best white robes, and gather for a few days of hating on "others" and trolling for gay sex.

This year's conference featured the usual suspects, with a few notable exceptions.

Conspicuously absent from the festivities were New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie'who committed the totally unforgivable sin of publicly thanking President Obama for his efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy'and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell'who committed
the equally unforgivable sin of raising taxes.

Also excluded from the reindeer games was GOProud, which is guilty of the greatest sin of all'promoting acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.

The void they left was filled by up-and-comers like Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, down-and-outers like Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and total crackpots like Pam Geller and Orly Taitz, DDS, Esq.

And thanks to the inclusion of Sen. Tim Scott, former Rep. Allen West, and Dr. Ben Carson, CPAC 2013 was shaping up to be a real celebration of diversity.

But that all fell apart on Friday afternoon, when a couple of white supremacists (quite understandably) mistook a panel discussion about GOP minority outreach for a Klan rally.