Ezra Klein's Blog, page 890

Reconciliation

Recap: What a prank phone call proves about Wisconsin; Jamie Galbraith talks countervailing powers; and how long can Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker hold out?

Elsewhere:

1) Steve Pearlstein gives away all our tricks.

2) An economic analysis of over-the-top wine reviews.

3) I have a blog post to write about this graph tomorrow.

4) "While Walker argues that his budget-repair legislation must be passed soon to avoid job cuts, the most controversial parts of his bill would have no immediate effect."

5) This is a good time to reread Chris Hayes's wonderful essay, "In Search of Solidarity."

Who will go home on "Top Chef" tonight?

The mood in Wisconsin

Eric Kleefeld reports from Gov. Scott Walker's news conference:

The first questioner asked Walker whether he could be trusted to negotiate in good faith, given he had discussed with "Koch" methods of tricking the Democrats into coming back to the Capitol building, and after he alluded to having considered bringing "troublemakers" into the crowds.

"For us I think it's real simple. First I want to say I take phone calls all the time," Walker said, before being interrupted by a reporter in the crowd who yelled, "Not mine!" ... Regarding the idea of planting agitators in the crowds, Walker said: "We've had all sorts of options brought to us by staff and lawmakers and people across the state, but as you heard we dismissed them."

Regarding the idea of bringing the Democrats into the Capitol to talk, only to have the Republicans use their presence in the building to declare the Senate in session for the budget -- as Walker said, "I'm not negotiating" -- Walker said: "I'm willing to talk, but ultimately I think it has to lead to a vote. I don't think that's a trick."

When the Q&A was over, Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey -- who had gotten in the room before the press conference began, took the governor's podium to give his own remarks and to take questions from reporters.

At this point, some young staffers from the governor's office opened the double doors wide so that the sounds of the thousands of protesters came pouring in, drowning out Hulsey. The reporters then asked for the doors to be closed, but the young men stayed at the doors, keeping them fully open.

As I wrote earlier, it's very easy to imagine a deal that defuses the situation in Wisconsin and lets everyone declare some sort of victory. What's hard to imagine is Walker making that deal.

Do most senators really see themselves as possible presidents?

"It's still the case that most Senators see a president when they look in the mirror," writes Jon Bernstein, "and that continues to be an important ingredient that helps make the Senate what it is."

You hear this all the time. But what's the evidence that it's true? Only one Senate Republican -- John Thune -- even explored running for president this cycle, and he decided against it. There were more in 2008, which was considered a banner year for senators with presidential ambitions, but "more" only meant five or six sitting senators who even considered entering the race. It didn't mean 15 or 20.

So who are all these senators who are keeping their presidential ambitions so tightly controlled? I know Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell don't see a president when they look in the mirror. I don't think Chuck Grassley or Max Baucus consider themselves likely presidents, nor do Ron Wyden or Mike Enzi. Is Amy Klobuchar planning a run? Chuck Schumer? John Barraso? Jay Rockefeller?

As far as I can tell, most senators look in the mirror and see a future committee chairperson, not a future president. And that's why most of them tend to keep their heads down and be team players rather than act out and grab the headlines for themselves. The idea that they all see themselves as a future president seems to me to be a cheap shot -- a way of making fun of their egos and ambitions without actually doing the hard work of evaluating their job performance and seeing whether they really do seem to be out for themselves.

'It's got to be better than this devil-may-be marketplace'"

Hmmmm:

A senior Patrick administration health care official said Friday that a single payer system may work more effectively and efficiently than Massachusetts's existing insurance market, a high-profile endorsement that raised eyebrows at a legislative hearing.

"I like the market, but the more and more I stay in it, the more and more I think that maybe a single payer would be better," said Terry Dougherty, director of MassHealth – the state-run Medicaid plan that insures nearly 1.3 million Massachusetts residents – when lawmakers asked for his "personal view" on a single payer system.

Dougherty's comment, made during a budget hearing at the Boston Public Library, prompted his boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services JudyAnn Bigby, to interject: "That's his personal opinion."

Dougherty noted that MassHealth, by far the largest program in state government, spends just 1.5 percent of its $10-billion-a-year budget on administrative costs – compared to about 9.5 percent by the private market, according to studies by the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy ... "It's got to be better than this devil-may-be marketplace," he said. "We don't build big buildings. We don't have high salaries. We don't have a lot of marketing, which makes, to some extent, some of the things that we do easier and less costly than some things that happen in the marketplace. Overall, my point is, we have individuals who work in state government in MassHealth ... who are just as smart, just as tactile, just as creative as people who work in the private sector, but they work for a lot less money."

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Predicting state budget deficits in two graphs

You might already have seen this graph John Sides drew up to test whether there is an obvious correlation between the strength of public-employee unions and state budget deficits. There isn't:

He's got some further graphs and commentary over at his place. If you use both state and local debt, you can perhaps see a weak relationship, but you have to be trying. But if you want a cleaner fit, do as Mike Konczal did and graph state budget deficits against negative equity, which serves here as a stand-in for the severity of that state's housing bubble.

"The mechanisms for how this contributes is important," writes Konczal. "[I]s it the unemployment? Is it that state governments with a larger housing bubble got more confident and spent as if all those property taxes were on their way? Are there other important, casual mechanisms? These are all good and crucial questions for us to answer, ones we should take up when we finish scapegoating teachers."

National Democrats weren't that concerned about unions before Wisconsin

Josh Barro points out that there's some hypocrisy in Barack Obama's support for the workers in Wisconsin:

The scope of collective bargaining for federal employees is sharply limited. They are forbidden to collectively bargain for wages or benefits; instead, raises are determined annually through legislation. Wisconsin unions would actually have slightly more scope for bargaining than this: they could bargain for cost of living adjustments up to CPI, or more if approved in a referendum. So, if the Wisconsin law is an assault, federal employee unions have already been pummeled.

But instead of trying to strengthen the hand of federal workers' unions, Obama supports aggressive use of the direct wage-setting power, urging Congress to freeze federal workers' pay for two years. He's made no suggestion that such a wage freeze should occur only through a bargaining process, which would be required in states where wages are a matter for collective bargaining.

It's worth noting that neither Obama officials nor their predecessors in the Clinton administration concerned themselves much with strengthening organized labor. Neither the Employee Free Choice Act nor any other serious reforms of the labor laws received serious attention from either White House. Meanwhile, the intervening Bush administration was quite concerned with undermining organized labor (you might remember that the final fight over the legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security had to do with some Republicans inserted to make the law difficult for Democrats to support).

I think it's possible that the events in Wisconsin are reminding Democrats of the role organized labor plays in both the political system and leading to a renewed interest in the health of the union movement, but it's really too early to tell.

How long can Scott Walker hold out?

Mother Jones's Andy Kroll has been doing some great reporting from Wisconsin, and he runs through four of the possible endgames here. They are:

1) The bill passes.

2) The collective-bargaining ban gets dropped.

3) A weird procedural effort to repackage the bill as "non-financial," which would mean the Senate Democrats don't need to be present.

4) The collective-bargaining ban gets pushed to the 2011-13 budget fight, which will happen in the spring.

The problem with trying to game out Gov. Scott Walker's negotiating style is that the guy doesn't seem like much of a negotiator. Another politician would've taken the concrete concessions on pensions and health-care benefits, threatened to revisit the collective-bargaining ban in the spring if any of the unions failed to make the promised concessions and thrown himself a parade. But not Walker.

Instead, he's rejected every compromise that's been offered -- and his allies are starting to notice. The State Journal, a paper that endorsed Walker, has advised him to take a deal. David Brooks has criticized him for an "unbalanced" approach to cuts. Andrew Sullivan, whose initial position was sympathy for Walker, has turned. And it's easy to imagine the prank-Koch call getting a lot of attention in Wisconsin and looking like one more piece of evidence that the governor is approaching this as an ideologue rather than just an executive. The first nonpartisan poll suggests Walker's position isn't as popular as he -- and many others -- initially thought.

A few days ago, the question was: How long can the Democrats hold out? Increasingly, it's how long Walker can hold out.

Lunch break

This is the cutest kid in the world:

What a prank call proves about Wisconsin

Gonzo journalist Ian Murphy noticed one of Wisconsin's Senate Democrats complaining that Gov. Scott Walker was impossible to reach on the phone. So Murphy came up with a prank call: He posed as right-wing financier David Koch and called Walker's receptionist. Shortly thereafter, he was on the phone with the governor himself. You can listen to the conversation here -- though the site seems overloaded by the traffic -- or read Adam Weinstein's summary here. Walker's office has confirmed the call was real.

To Walker's credit, he doesn't say anything incriminating. When Murphy/Koch offers to plant demonstrators, Walker declines. The worst you can say is that when Murphy/Koch makes a lewd comment about Mika Breszinski, Walker doesn't challenge him on it. But that portion reads to me as Walker politely grunting in response to an odd provocation. I imagine politicians are pretty good at gently moving the conversation along when their contributors say crazy things.

But if the transcript of the conversation is unexceptional, the fact of it is lethal. The state's Democratic senators can't get Walker on the phone, but someone can call the governor's front desk, identify themselves as David Koch, and then speak with both the governor and his chief of staff? That's where you see the access and power that major corporations and wealthy contributors will have in a Walker administration, and why so many in Wisconsin are reluctant to see the only major interest group representing workers taken out of the game.

The critique many conservatives have made of public-sector unions is that they both negotiate with and fund politicians. It's a conflict of interest. Well, so too do corporations, and wealthy individuals. That's why Murphy -- posing as Koch -- was able to get through to Walker so quickly. And it shows what Walker is really interested in here: He is not opposed, in principle, to powerful interest groups having the ear of the politicians they depend on, and who depend on them. He just wants those interest groups to be the conservative interest groups that fund him, and that he depends on.