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2008 United States House of Representatives elections in Georgia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008 United States House of Representatives elections in Georgia

← 2006 November 4, 2008 (2008-11-04) 2010 →

All 13 Georgia seats to the United States House of Representatives
  Majority party Minority party
 
Party Republican Democratic
Last election 7 6
Seats won 7 6
Seat change Steady Steady
Popular vote 1,883,633 1,858,090
Percentage 50.34% 49.66%
Swing Decrease 4.63% Increase 4.63%

The 2008 congressional elections in Georgia were held on November 4, 2008, to determine who would represent the state of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives, coinciding with the presidential and senatorial elections. Representatives are elected for two-year terms; those elected will serve in the 111th Congress from January 3, 2009, until January 3, 2011.

Georgia has thirteen seats in the House, apportioned according to the 2000 United States census. Its 2007–2008 congressional delegation consisted of seven Republicans and six Democrats. No districts changed party, although CQ Politics had forecasted districts 8 and 12 to be at some risk for the incumbent party.

The general primary was held July 15, 2008.[1]

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  • Dartmouth - Change? The 2008 Elections: Outcomes, Consequences, and Next
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Transcription

- Welcome to the Rockefeller Center, and our Post-Election panel titled Change: The 2008 Elections, Outcomes, Observations and Next Steps. This is a bit of a different format than we're used to, and hopefully it will work well for us in that we can hear from 10 scholars instead of just one or two at a time. It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Rockefeller Center, this is part of our 25th anniversary celebration, and our centennial anniversary of Nelson Rockefeller's birth. Particularly I'd like to acknowledge the board of visitors for the Rockefeller Center, who is here today as part of their semi-annual meetings, with the Rockefeller Center, so thanks for coming, appreciate it. The way this is going to work out is that I'm going to talk briefly about the outcomes, and just actually what happened during the election. Then we're going to move to look at institutional perspectives, so we'll see the impact of this on the executive branch, on the congress, and on the courts. And then we'll move into the policy realm, and hear from a number of scholars who have specific expertise in various areas of public policy. We're going to try to stick to a five minute limit for each of us, now that's a hard task for academics but we're going to try to live by that. So without further ado, I'm going to talk about the election results, and a bit of exit poll results that were posted online in various outlets. The obvious numbers that we have, the outcome being Obama winning with 52.5% of the vote, and 65 million votes overall. And up until today we have 364 electoral votes. Missouri is still out and undecided. On the McCain side, we had 46.2% and 57 million votes, and 163 electoral votes. On the congressional side of the ledger, again as of this morning so we added the Oregon numbers to this, we've got now 55 democrats, 40 republicans, 2 independents, and pardon the spelling, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman still sitting as independents. And Joe Lieberman might be very independent as of the next couple days, we'll find out. (laughter) In Minnesota, Georgia, and Alaska, we still have the three republican incumbents battling for their seats, and we'll see what happens there. On the house side, a net gain of 20 seats there. We've basically gone back 20 years, these are virtually the exact numbers that George W. Bush had when he took office in 1989. So we've seen a long strange trip that we've taken ourselves on over the last 20 years, to get back to a congress that, although the composition of the congress looks quite different than it did 20 years ago, the numbers are the same but who they are and where they represent is quite different. As we now know, we have a total blue New England, with no republicans from the New England states in the House of Representatives right now. Gubernatorial races, we had 11 going on. Basically status quo, six of the races were democrats and they're still held by democrats. Four were republican, held by republican. And the one seat that did switch is Missouri, a republican was replaced by a democrat. So we now have 29 democratic governors, and 21 republican governors. There were 44 states which held state legislative elections, in their houses and senates, or upper and lower houses. Of the 4,758 house races, net gain is 63 seats for the democrats, and on the senate side of the 1,700 or so that did battle there was a net gain of 8 seats. So pretty much of a status quo election. Which is interesting when you go back and look at prior to the 2006 elections, these numbers were virtually identical. That is they were virtually the same number of democrats and republicans of the 5,400 seats that were in play, over the 50 states. It was virtually tied in the houses of all the legislatures. So we saw a big gain in 2006 and 2007. So the 44 states that had elections also had elections in '06, and then the six states held elections in '07, we saw a 240 seat swing in the '06 and '07 cycles, and only a 63 seat swing here in the 2008 cycle. So the way it began earlier at the state level, then we saw at the national level. Some of the propositions, the ban on gay rights, the ban on gay marriage, was on in three states, and it lost in all three states. That is the gay rights side lost, that is, the bans were upheld in Arizona, California, and Florida, and in Arkansas they passed an initiative that bans gay couples from adopting children, and that passed with 57%. There were two affirmative action initiatives, or amendments, on the ballot. And the Colorado one is still undecided, and the Nebraska one actually was passed, 58 to 42. Limits on abortion rights, those all went down to defeat. In California, Proposition 4, in South Dakota, and Colorado was basically a language that basically said human life begins at the moment of conception, and that was voted down, rejected by 73% of the voters out there. So, what happened? The exit poll results, to this point, haven't been terribly challenged as they were last time around, so there's a sense that there's some credibility of data that was available out there. I've highlighted some of the things that are rather interesting. It's obviously not an exhaustive list of what happened, but just some of the key areas. When you look at males, it was basically a draw. They represented 47% of the respondents in the electorate, if they weighted it. Women, obviously the gender gap was there again. The interesting thing is looking at married females, versus unmarried females, I mean that's just startling. To see those numbers (laughter) how different. Interestingly, married overall men and women was 52 to 47 in favor of McCain. And when you look at married mothers, so the overall married figure for women was 48 to 51 in favor of McCain. Married mothers were 51-47 in favor of Obama, so you know some rather interesting things. Then when you look at the white vote versus the non-white vote, again, it's startling the difference there. Where McCain won by 12 points among white voters, and Obama received 80% of the non-white vote. I highlighted the African-American votes, since that was the most clearly defined constituency for Obama. Among Asian-Americans it was roughly 66%, and among Hispanics it was also in the mid-60's in favor of Obama. So overall it was at 80%. And then when we look at the age factor, again, 18% of the electorate was under the age of 30, and they voted 66 to 32 in favor of Obama. A huge gain for him. I simply split the income at $50,000. If you made under $50,000, 60 to 38 in favor of Obama. A virtual tie when you looked at those that made over $50,000 a year. By party, no one would have found any trouble with those kinds of numbers. 89 to 10, and 89 to 9, in favor of republicans and democrats but the independents broke in favor of Obama, and they constituted 29% of the electorate. And then touching on a theme that we pursued here at the Rockefeller Center back in June, moderate voters were the telling of the tale here. Where liberals went 89 to 10, or 88 to 10 in favor of Obama, interestingly enough 20% of conservatives voted for Obama, but 60% of moderates to 39% favored Obama. First time voters, another key block for the Obama campaign, those were 68% for Obama and only 31% for McCain, virtually a dead heat when you took those out of the equation. So that's what happened, that was some quick explanations as to what went on in the elections, and now we're going to move onto the presidential, so I'll jump ahead a couple slides here. To professor Dean Lacy, who's going to talk about the presidency, so we're going to hear first about the presidency and the executive branch and what's going to be going on there in the next weeks and months, then we'll hear about congress from Linda Fowler, and then Sonu Bedi will talk about the impact on the federal courts, so Dean. - Thanks. Well thanks, Ron, and thank all of you for attending and especially thank you to all the voters who turned out in this historic election. Barack Obama and the democrats do not, as most presidents don't, have mandate from the election. The only mandate from this election was the repudiation of the republican administration, and a desire for change. Obama and the democrats must forge a mandate early, by appealing to the center, focusing on problem solving, and avoiding the mistakes of past presidents. Three mistakes to avoid early in the administration are, first of all, satisfying the base before satisfying the center. Both Clinton in '93 and Bush in 2001 sought to satisfy their base before reaching to the center. For Clinton, this ended in a disaster in 1994 in the midterm elections. The same may have happened to Bush in 2002 had it not been for the boost in approval he got after 9/11. The second mistake to avoid is failing to coordinate with one's own party. Barack Obama enters with many of the same congressional resources that Jimmy Carter had in 1977. Carter failed to talk with and coordinate with his own leadership in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and as a result stalled his transition, couldn't get his policy agenda off the ground. Obama would be well-advised to avoid Carter's mistake. The third mistake to avoid is planning too long. Bill Clinton entered office in 1993, hoping to institute broad healthcare reform. He studied the issue for three, four months before getting any bill before congress. And if you miss that first 100 days of opportunity, then chances are you're not going to be able to get your most important initiatives passed. Despite the fact that Barack Obama enters office with the worst hand dealt to a US President since 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt faced the Great Depression, and the prospects of Fascism rising in Europe. Obama has several opportunities not afforded recent presidents. First of all he won a clear majority of the popular vote, which doesn't happen much in American presidential elections. Over one third of our presidents have entered office without a majority of the popular vote. Second, his opposition is fractured, very fractured if you're paying attention to the news. And third, he has a high role, he has a roll of high-quality democratic candidates for executive positions, who served in previous democratic administrations, yet left office with high approval ratings. In filling his White House and cabinet, he can choose from some experienced veterans from the Clinton administration, perhaps even the Carter administration, and some new faces. Obama's already named Clinton strategist and member of congress Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. Forget the cries in the media that this demonstrates that Obama is not going to reach out to republicans. The Chief of Staff position is not typically a position where one expects a PR machine, rather it's an organizational and strategic office. And in that sense Emmanuel was a very good choice. Also having served in part with the Israeli army in 1991, he was rust proofing breaks on Israeli army equipment, satisfies some concerns that maybe the Israeli government had about Obama. And also has some foreign policy experience. So Emmanuel in that sense is a good pick. Now I can only speculate about what's going to happen with some of the high-level secretarial positions. For Secretary of Treasury, there's a possibility we'll have a Dartmouth grad, Timothy Geithner, an '83, imagine a second Dartmouth grad at that treasury in such a short time. Unfortunately the circumstances could be better, but that would still be nice to have another Dartmouth grad in the office. Others who are mentioned are Lauren Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, and was president of Harvard. Jon Corzine who's governor of New Jersey. And former federal reserve chair, Paul Volcker, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter and served under Ronald Reagan. All four of those would make excellent appointments. For Secretary of State, maybe John Kerry is at the top of the list, though I suspect that Bill Richardson will be Obama's pick. And that's because Bill Richardson endorsed Obama early, and also would be a Latino in the cabinet, and the Latino vote was very important for Obama's election. For Secretary of Defense, look for Obama maybe to pick a republican, continue with Robert Gates or maybe pick former member of congress Chuck Hagel. For Attorney General, the favorite right now is Eric Holder, who was a deputy attorney general under the Clinton administration and would be an African-American appointee. The only group that Obama could not have afforded to lose in the 2008 election and still capture the electoral college was the African-American vote. Without the latino vote, without the youth vote, without married or unmarried women, Obama would still have won the electoral college. But without the African-American vote, Obama would not have won the electoral college. So expect his cabinet to be centrist, pragmatic, problem solving oriented, and maybe include a republican or two. And I've heard recently for Secretary of Education, perhaps Colin Powell's name is in consideration and he'd like that post. I'll turn the floor over now to Frank Reagan professor of policy studies, Linda Fowler, to talk about congress. (applause) - Okay, well I think to understand what's going on between the new president and congress, you have to start with figuring out whether the seats that were picked up in the house and senate, had anything to do with Obama's election. And I think the answer is no, basically, the same national ties that lifted Obama's vote also lifted the congressional vote. And certainly last spring before Obama even had the nomination, it was pretty clear to those of us who follow congressional elections, that the democrats were going to pick up at least 20 seats, maybe more. And we were all predicting five senate seats, and it could end up being more than that. So, there are a couple of people in the senate who probably owe their election to Obama. And that would probably be Kay Hagan in North Carolina. - [woman] Excuse me, could you please use the microphone? People in the back of the room can't hear you. - Oh, I'm so sorry, well did they hear anything? Shall I start over? - [woman] Yes, please. - Okay, well now I have to cut my time. At any rate, we were talking about whether the members of congress owe their election to Obama, and the argument I was making was that that's not the case. What was really driving the congressional outcome was the fact that there were so many vacant republican seats, in the house there were a lot of strategic retirements, and the same was true in the senate. So the reason why people thought that the democrats would do so well, is that it's always easier to win an open seat than to defeat an incumbent. And there were just a lot of vulnerable, a lot of open seats that fostered these opportunities. It's also the case that doners who give to the congressional campaign committee funds, had pretty much decided that this was going to be a democratic year and they were giving their money to the democratic congressional campaign committee and the senatorial campaign committee. And the republicans, for the first time in a long, long time had a huge financial deficit in both races. And what that meant was that at the end of the campaign season, when candidates like Kay Hagen in North Carolina started to look like she was coming on, the democrats were able to go and dump a million dollars in her state in the last two weeks. And the republicans couldn't do that. So, the reason why that's important is that they're not a lot of democrats sitting in congress who think they owe either their majority or their individual seat to Barack Obama. And many of them have been there, they lived through an enormously frustrating period in the minority, their two years in the majority were a time of extraordinary frustration because they had only a 51-49 vote in the senate. And that meant that the initiatives that they were passing in the house were floundering in the senate because of the filibuster. So there's a lot of pent up energy in the senate, and you couple that with the fact that the congress, generally, went through a period of extraordinary quiescence as a policy making body, and I think there's a sense that congress is ready to reassert itself after basically being prone for the last eight years. So this is going to be a scrappy, feisty congress. And I don't think Obama has any illusions about the fact that he's going to be hailed as the conquering hero when he gets to Washington, I think you see that recognition in the appointment of Emmanuel. So the question is, what are the democrats going to do with their majority? And will they make the mistake of thinking that they have a mandate for progressive policy making? I think Dean has already suggested that that's not the case and I agree with that. That the democrats were given an invitation. Come in here and see if you can fix this mess. That's not the same thing as a mandate for a particular set of progressive policies. And the complex interactions of health, and energy, and the economy, coupled with huge deficits. That are going to get worse as the recession deepens. Means that the kind of jocking of whose priorities are going to be at the top of the list is going to be quite aggressive, I think. So the question, I think, is really how can the new president work effectively with this congress. I think both Carter and Clinton made the mistake of not understanding the kind of political pressures that members of congress end up under. I remember Louise Slaugther, who's now Chair of the Rules committee telling me this story of the first couple of months of Bill Clinton's first term, and she said to me "we've been BTU'd." I said what does that mean? She said well we had to take this really hard vote on the floor of the congress to raise energy taxes in order to cut the budget deficit and promote conservation, and after we'd voted for it Bill Clinton basically caved into the senate. So we'd taken this really hard, costly vote to us and then in the end it didn't mean anything. So the most important thing presidents have to remember is don't push members to do things that are hard for them, unless you really are prepared to fight for those kind of initiatives and make sure that that hard vote was successful. Another vote in the first year of the Clinton, was on the balance budget resolution. Marjorie Medvillas, I can't even remember her last name. Yeah, first year, freshman from Pennsylvania. She cast the tie-breaking vote on the budget resolution, and as she walked back from casting her votes the republicans said, "bye, bye Marjorie." And in truth, she was defeated in '92. So that's the kind of thing that presidents have to be very careful about. In terms of husbanding not only their own political capital, but not squandering the votes of their supporters. And lastly I think that there's going to be a real challenge, the center of gravity in the republican party has shifted to the right. Because of the departure of people like Smith from Oregon. And so there are going to be very few republicans for a democratic president to work with. I just did an interview right now, a couple minutes ago, with a reporter from Lewiston. It's Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, and then after that you start to run out of names. (laughter) And so what that means is that the democrats are going to have to pass their legislation pretty much on their own. There aren't a lot of people they can reach out to. And I think that means that the blue dog democrats, the democrats who are from conservative districts, that were elected in 2006 and again in 2008, are going to have a very strong influence on what actually gets passed. Now that might be good, because Dean has just told you that this president is going to need to govern from the center. Before he starts pleasing the base. And the blue dog democrats may make sure that he does that. So let me turn this over to Sonu, (applause) and you are there. - Great, thanks Linda, and thanks Dean. So if you sort of think about it, Dean discussed Article 2, the executive branch. Linda, Article 1, and so I'll be discussing Article 3. One thing to note is that unlike those other two branches, those that serve under, judges, the Article 3 serve for life, so change in the federal judiciary is a glacial, it's not so quick. And so there are three levels of federal courts. District levels, circuit levels, and of course the United States Supreme Court. Barack Obama with the now majority of the democratic senate will appoint judges to all those three levels. Currently, sort of to give you a sense of what the current state of the federal judiciary is, 60% of all sitting federal judges, that's at all three of the levels, were appointed by republicans. And so 40% appointed by democrat presidents. And so this percentage also holds in the circuits, in the 13th circuits, in fact in the 13 circuits in the United States, and these circuits are scattered geographically throughout the United States, most lean republican. Most lean republican, in fact, George W. in the last eight years has appointed about one third of all sitting federal judges. So while Obama will get to appoint new federal judges at all these levels it is not an understatement to say that ideologically, most of the federal judiciary will stay where it is for a while. Let me then sort of talk about the Supreme Court, obviously that's what most people think about when they think of the federal courts. And here too, I'm suggesting that there won't be immediate ideological change. The two justices that are the oldest, Justice Stevens and Justice Ginsburg, those are the two that are most likely to retire. And so Justice Souter, actually, he's not the oldest but would like to come back to New Hampshire and so has sort of expressed intentions to retire. And so, if Obama in his first term gets to appoint, let's say, three new judges those three new judges would all be on the liberal side, so it's not really going to change the makeup of the court. And so, hence, there's not really going to be an immediate ideological change to the left. So, what does that mean? Decisions such as abortion, decisions such as affirmative action, that are all 5 to 4 decisions, upholding those two practices will stay the same. Now there is an issue when Obama does select these judges, is he just going to appoint liberals or is he really going to appoint crusading liberals? Sort of in the mold of Chief Justice Warren, Marshall, and Brennan, and so there's evidence to suggest he's praised those crusading liberal justices. But also he's applauded, for example, the recent Heller second amendment case that struck down DC's handgun regulation. And he's criticized the court in invalidating the death penalty for child rapists. So it's unclear whether he is going to select crusading liberals or just liberals. It should be noted that in his own right, Obama is a constitutional scholar, he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, so it's the first time in a long while that we have a president that he himself actually would have been someone that could sit on the court. Second then let me talk about who he's likely to appoint to the Supreme Court, whom he's likely to appoint. And here I'd like to say that his first two appointments will probably be a woman and/or a Latino. And so as we heard from Dean, and as you know from the sort of demographics of the election, Latinos especially in that southwest area of the United States are a particularly important demographic. 19% of all federal judges are women, only one obviously sits on the supreme court. And 5% of all federal judges are latino, and none sit currently on the supreme court. And so let me just give you a quote that Obama made to the Planned Parenthood conference last year in July, suggesting whom he thinks should sit on the court. He said, "we need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." We do know he voted against Roberts and Alito in their confirmation hearings. And so look, you know, people always speculate who are the people that he's going to nominate. And so it's always a dicey business to suggest who it could be. We don't really know, but let me sort of hand out some possible contenders that have been floated. In terms of sort of appointing a woman and a Latina, the two names that come to mind are Sonia Sotomayor, on the second circuit, a very well respected jurist there. Kim Wardlaw, who's on the ninth circuit. There's also Diane Wood, that's one the seventh circuit. And also Elena Kagan, who's currently Dean of Harvard Law School. It should be pointed out that Wood and Kagan actually worked alongside Obama when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. So that could be something that may be relevant. Anyway, I will leave it at that and it's my pleasure to call up Denise Anthony from the Sociology Department to talk about healthcare. (applause) - Thanks, Sonu, and thank you to Andrew and the Rockefeller Center, it's my pleasure to be here. When we talk about healthcare, there are three big issues: access, quality, and cost. And I'm going to talk just about access today. But we often interchangeably start talking about access, and we really want to talk about quality. So, anyway, I just want to make that distinction. So Obama has said that some of the key elements in his proposal for healthcare is to expand coverage, expand insurance coverage in the US. And he has a couple of different policy ideas for doing that. One is to mandate insurance coverage for children, so the parents would be responsible for having insurance for the children. In many ways this is a smart idea, Howard Dean actually had this as part of his platform a number of years ago when he ran for president. Children, I think everyone can agree, that they don't, they shouldn't necessarily be subject to the choice to, if you believe that healthcare is a choice, they shouldn't be exposed to that choice. Children are also relatively cheap to cover, because they are healthy, they don't use that much healthcare, and there's a big payoff. Because getting them preventative care, getting them immunized and vaccinated and preventative care has a big payoff. Because that prevents a lot of disease among children. So that's a smart move, and would expand coverage pretty dramatically because many of the people who don't have insurance in the United States are, in fact, children. The second way that Obama is proposing to expand insurance coverage is what he calls the pay or play for employers. You either play by offering insurance coverage to your employees, or you have to pay into a fund that is really number three, the national health plan, to offer insurance or make insurance available to those who can't access insurance through their employer. So if you're a small business and it's too expensive, or you decide that it's too expensive to offer an insurance plan to your employees, then you have to pay a fee or a tax into a plan, into a pool that will then go toward supporting a national health plan for the uninsured, for people who work in small businesses and don't have access to insurance through their employer. The national health plan, then, is a way to set up a plan that would be available to anyone who doesn't have access to insurance, and this is a way to try to capture those adults who fall outside of the mandate for the children and get everyone covered. The goal is universal coverage, for all Americans, without the mandate and so Obama is trying to sort of finesse that political problem a little bit. By mandating for children, and then offering a plan for those adults who currently don't have insurance. One more element to the plan for expanding coverage is to create a reinsurance program for high-cost medical cases. Sometimes for employers who want to offer insurance to their employees, especially if they are relatively small employer, a small business with few employees, if they have one very sick employee, the insurance costs for insuring that group are very high, and so one person with diabetes in your small company can mean that the average premium to everyone in the company goes way up. If we had a separate insurance program that would insure the high-risk, high-cost cases that would lower the premiums on average for everyone else in these employer groups. Large employers aren't subject to that because they're insuring the risk over a much larger population. So they aren't as subject to the change or the high-costs that come from one sick patient, or one sick employee, and so this would help to reduce the costs of insurance for those small businesses. So it might mean that more small businesses might be able to offer insurance to their employees, thus expanding coverage. For those who still can't, they will contribute to this fund that will establish the national health plan to offer insurance at a relatively low cost to others who don't get access through their employer, or who are self-employed and the individual insurance market is too expensive. So the idea is to get to universal coverage without a mandate, but to expand the opportunities for insurance for all Americans and the 45 million who are currently uninsured. Now the reason this is related to access is because insurance coverage contributes to access to care, not surprising, we all know that if you don't have insurance coverage, you are much less likely to be able to access healthcare in the United States. So access depends on coverage. It doesn't depend entirely on coverage, because even if you don't have coverage you can get treated in an emergency room. Thus contributing to the high-cost of healthcare in the United States, so ultimately there may be a way to address cost issues by addressing coverage in order to get more people access to care. However, the last bullet is something to keep in mind when we talk about coverage, insurance coverage in the United States, coverage does not mean access to care, coverage may be a necessary condition to get access to care, but coverage alone is not access to care. And there are a lot of other aspects of healthcare that need to be addressed to provide full access to high-quality, affordable care. Coverage is one of those steps. Coverage allows the Obama team, and maybe the United States, to begin to address quality and cost issues. But coverage is just one piece of that puzzle, and won't alone increase access. But it'll get us much further along that path to access to high-quality care at a lower, affordable price than we currently are with 45 million Americans. Thank you. (applause) I'm happy to introduce economics professor Doug Irwin. - I want to put trade policy in context. First of all, this is not a high-priority, top of the agenda issue. The economy is not doing well, financial system is very weak, we have a major fiscal deficit, these are important priorities for economic policy. Trade policy is a medium to longer term issue. In fact, I suspect the Obama team would like to do nothing on trade policy, and have a complete time out on trade agreements. And that's for several reasons, first of all the democratic party is completed divided over the issue, it's domestically very sensitive, there's no political payoff to pushing trade liberalization at this point, and the economic payoff to trade liberalization is years down the road. And finally, there's only economic grief if you succumb to protectionism. So the status quo, doing nothing, is certainly an option. That said, the issue is to some extent unavoidable. Congress has to make a decision about pending free trade agreements with Columbia and South Korea. And that's why I've put up this slide about NAFTA. Because this happened 15 years ago, many of the undergraduates were about three or four years old at that time, but we are still having a national debate about NAFTA. When Obama went to Ohio he said that he would want to renegotiate NAFTA. Hillary Clinton in Ohio said NAFTA was a mistake, and I'm sure that's not the first time she's said that to her husband. (laughter) But Bill Clinton, pardon me, Barack Obama's position is actually formally a bit more nuanced than that. He says that he's in favor of these trade agreements, but he wants stronger environmental and labor provisions in them. And so we really don't know what exactly the administrational policy will be. In fact I see both the administration and the congress as being divided, between the internationalists and the labor movement. And a lot depends upon who wins that battle in terms of what sort of trade policy we'll see. The internationalists will say that we ought to continue to pursue these free trade agreements, perhaps have a few more qualifications in them unlike the Bush administration. But it is a worthwhile endeavor to try to open up world markets and expand the demand for US exports. The labor movement, however, sees these agreements very differently, they seem them as a pro-business type of policy that harms workers in the United States, reduces wages and what have you, and I think they would put up a very strong stand against further trade agreements, and perhaps even try to renegotiate old agreements or enact new legislation that makes it easier for import-competing industries to impose tariffs against foreign countries. So if the internationalists are to win this battle, within the administration and within the congress, I think we might see small incremental progress. In terms of moving trade policy forward. If the labor movement wins, I think we'll see a dead stop, and possible legislation that might even restrict or raise the possibility of restricting imports in the future. Now the mood among congressional democrats is that they don't want to touch these things at all. And so I think that's another reason why we just may not see anything going on here. Two other issues regarding trade policy that will come up. One is what to do with the WTO, the World Trade Organization. There have been talks going on for seven years, they could easily go on another seven years. There's no urgency, no rush in terms of that at the particular moment. The last one would be China trade, and I think think really hinges upon whether there are demands domestically for relief from imports from China. We have not seen that recently, the dollar's been relatively weak. And that's promoted exports, in fact, exports have been sort of keeping the economy above sort of the zero growth level for some time, it obviously is not going to continue to do that. But the question is what should the administration policy be towards China, and I think they'll have to be largely reactive there and not proactive. And with that I'll turn it over to talk about energy policy and Lee Lynd. (applause) - So, energy, Doug began his comments saying that this might not be a high priority. I think it's fair to say that more than has been the case in probably ever in the presidency and likely the congress, this now is a high priority. So I thought I'd look at three things, just observe that in spite of the economy the statement has been made several times in the press that in an Obama administration, building the new energy economy will be the top priority. I don't think that a president-elect has ever said that before, to my knowledge. What does this mean as a practical matter? And what will be different in an Obama administration? And the funny thing, just a story on myself, when I originally wrote that I was sort of thinking versus the McCain administration, and I realized you know what, you're a little bit too enmeshed in the election. Because what really matters is compared to what's happened in the past, not compared to what would have been. So, I would just comment on item one here, that in my view this emphasis is very appropriate and indeed it's about time. I will save you the long sermon, but I think a very good case could be made that energy is a dominant determinant of some basic prerequisites for healthy human society. Like peace, prosperity, and sustainability. And that not only that, but that is not true just now. It's always been true and likely always will be. We do at our point in history, though, have an especially critical set of considerations relative to energy that makes this arguably the defining challenge of our time. As far as what is, depending on how you look at it, either needed or likely to happen, I think that--not sure who's view I'm recommending. Either my view or the Obama administration, which I think align pretty well on the needed side. In any case, one of them is accelerated technology creation through enhanced supportive R&D, the Obama administration, president-elect Obama is speaking of an Apollo project in energy R&D. And although at times there hasn't been anything remotely close to that ever, except maybe in the Carter administration when the Solar Energy Research Institute was founded and energy R&D dollars did go up dramatically. Since then the trend has been declining in both public and private sector funding for energy R&D for the last quarter century. Accelerated technology deployment, which is somewhat different, once something's created getting it out into the marketplace. Placing a value on carbon, I think is likely to happen in this administration. In my opinion, and people frankly who are more deeply versed in energy policy than I am, it would have been likely to have occured in a McCain administration. I think it's certain that energy would have gotten more attention in a McCain administration compared to a Bush administration. Frankly if the term limits had been repealed, and president Bush would have been reelected, we would have had more attention on energy. It's just that it's this rising tide of concern. But then the fourth component is increased energy utilization efficiency, one can show fairly quickly on the back of an envelope that the world's energy challenges cannot be provided on the supply side alone. What will be different in an Obama administration compared to what we've seen? Number one, a higher overall priority given to energy, but as I mentioned, I don't think that's just reflecting this administration's priorities. I think it's reflecting the time in which this administration is taking office. I think it's fair to say a greater openness to public sector investment, and indeed regulation in the energy economy than we have seen. And then finally I speak here on this last bullet about energy capital versus energy income. By energy capital, I mean fossil fuels and uranium basically these are things that we can potentially run out of. I think we will see a greater emphasis on energy income in an Obama administration than we have seen, and in this case than we would have seen in a McCain administration. Keep in mind, we're coming from an administration whose vice president, to some extent the point person on energy said, and I think I can summon this quote, that while conservation may be a personal virtue it is no substitute for an energy policy. I think we're going to see more of an emphasis in an Obama administration on not only the supply side, but also increased energy utilization efficiency. And with that, it's my pleasure to hand the podium and and microphone to Annelise Orleck from the history department to talk about social welfare and poverty. (applause) - I wanted to start by saying that when I was challenged to think about how I could talk about this policy in five minutes it began to become clear to me that Obama is feeling very much the same kinds of pressures. I fully agree with Dean that he is interested in moving quickly, by all accounts his transition team is, the words that I read in one account are scouring histories of FDR's first 100 days. Because of his concern about this lack of mandate, and because Nancy Pelosi has already said they plan to govern from the center, I would suggest that what Obama is going to try to do immediately is build on existing legal and social welfare frameworks. Both from the New Deal and later from The Great Society. Now Obama has been very pleased of course with all the discussion of the New New Deal, and then comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt. He has not commented on it, but it has come out in a rather positive fashion. Comparisons to Lyndon Johnson, of course, and The Great Society, are ones that he is less likely to respond positively to publicly. However, what I wanted to begin by saying is that despite the negative press that The Great Society has gotten for the past thirty years, if not forty, if not, you know, from the moment that the war on poverty was announced in 1964. Most or many of the programs that were established are still in place in one form or another. They've been changed, allocation strategies and systems have been reorganized during the presidencies that followed Lyndon Johnson, but many of these programs are still on the books. And so that allows Obama to work on a variety of issues that I'll talk about in a moment, through the budget negotiation process. Rather than through the very difficult, and painful, and dangerous politically, the dangerous process of attempting to pass new legislation. The other issue that I want to raise is that you can't really talk about poverty and social welfare without talking about jobs policy. I'm not going to talk about that very much, except to say that both FDR and Martin Luther King, Jr. are both quoted as saying that a strong labor movement and strong unions are the best anti-poverty policy. Obama has referred to those quotes in his sponsorship of the Employee Free Choice Act. Which I suspect we will see again on the floor of congress as an attempt to allow workers greater opportunity to form and join unions in today's workplace. I also think that Obama is going to look toward job creation and this gets back to Lee's comments earlier he has promised this, I've heard him call it an Apollo project and a Manhattan project. For alternative energy, he's talking about 5 million jobs that they expect to create somehow with government intervention. The specifics are fuzzy, but just this afternoon he in his speech about the kinds of things he's going to do, very quickly, on the economy he commented that if there is aid to the ailing auto companies, and I suspect this discussion took place this afternoon with his economic advisers, who included the governor of Michigan Katherine Granholm, that that aid would come in the form of incentives to create more fuel efficient cars and build them here in the United States. Something that he's talked about extensively in the campaign. Obviously with estimates last night that the collapse of one of the major three American car companies could affect as many as 3.3 million jobs in the United States, this is going to be a priority and something that he's going to speak about very quickly. The other job creation program that he has talked about, is really very much out of the New Deal Model, and that is a job creation program to rebuild crumbling infrastructure in the United States and he has talked about creating jobs to rebuild roads, bridges, dams, and schools, in particular that would require there is no longer a New Deal program of that kind on the books. However I think allusions to the New Deal made carefully and strategically might create enough positive political good will to pass such a program. Obviously in this moment of tremendous deficit and collapse in economy, that could well be a hard sell. But you're already hearing from economists including Paul Krugman in The New York Times today. That increasing the deficit slightly during this time of tremendous economic despair and collapse, that may be an okay strategy to pursue. Next off, in building on the New Deal policies, he has promised to protect social security. If there has ever been a moment when the dangers of investing social security even voluntarily on the stock market, have been clear this is it. He also is likely to remind Americans that social security reduced poverty among the single longest lasting impoverished group in the American population and during the time before Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, the largest poor group, the elderly. And that's not a road we want to go back down. Nor will the American Association of Retired Persons, and other well-organized senior lobbies, allow that to happen I don't think. He has already called for ending the taxation of seniors who make under $50,000. And he has reiterated that promise. Just this afternoon he also turned back to another of the New Deal social safety net mainstays, unemployment benefits, and called for expanding and extending the period. Exapanding the benefits and extending the period during which workers can claim them. I would argue that, again, as someone who seems to be somewhat of a student of history, he is aware that the high foreclosure rate in certain parts of the country, the loss of over a million jobs I think as of today, in this year, could result in the kinds of scenes, perhaps, that were seen during the depression. And certainly all he needs to do, I think, is evoke those images to create some support for that. And finally he's talking about a National Service Program, which evokes both I think the New Deal and the Kennedy era, and early Johnson Great Society eras. But he's tying this national service program to money for college, so all of these are dimensions I think of the poverty policy. The second piece that he intends to do, I think will perhaps be less public. And that is to build on existing war on poverty programs. Robert Rector, the Heritage Foundation welfare analyst, said rather wistfully during the 2005-06 budget negotiations that there were only 12 republicans in congress who would vote to get rid of all of the remaining war on poverty programs. Indeed, during budget negotiations in those years, attempts by President Bush to zero out funding for social services block grants and community development block grants was met with strong opposition from his own party. Some of those moderates, as you've pointed out, are no longer there including Norm Coleman, of Minnesota, well he may be there we don't know. But who was one of the leading opponents of this attempt to get rid of community development block grants and indeed the republican senators from the state of Maine pointed out that in contrast to this image of these block grants going to all of those undesirables, you know code word for people of color in urban centers, in fact, community development block grants were doing things like providing potable water in rural places in Maine. So I think what we will see is an attempt to expand funding for community development and social service block grants. He knows already from his time in the senate that there is some support in the republican party for that. A more dangerous political move would be to return to the war on poverty mandate for maximum feasible participation by the poor themselves. The much-maligned line in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 that local politicians and local governments ran from because it tended to organize the poor in protest against those very governments. Nevertheless, some of the articles today talking about the "community organizer in Chief" suggest that there is still an interest in local grassroots network building in the Obama administration. He's also keenly aware that those networks exist. Because they were mobilized all across the country in an unbelievably get out the vote machine. And I think that that get out the vote machine, along with his labor get out the vote machines will remain groups that he is to some extent beholden to. We'll see if that happens. I would argue that there will be some call for expanding the community health center program, which was cut about 25% in the Reagan and Bush years. It's literally extended life expectancy in many poor communities across the country. There's a good deal of evidence for its strengths, and I also have heard some discussion of tying that to an expanded public health service medical school loan forgiveness program. We'll see if any of this happens, but it's certainly a possibility. Head Start, the controversial program that provides daycare and job training, day care for poor children in a way that's supposed to improve results once they reach kindergarten and elementary school, has been on the chopping block for many years. Again I would predict that it's a program that has staying power, and that you will see in the budget some expansion of this program or attempts to expand the program. Because it does also provide low paying jobs, but jobs for poor women in the communities where Head Start centers are located. I would argue that they'll be an expansion of both nutrition and prenatal/postnatal care dimensions of the women and infant children nutrition program, which has been extremely successful in cutting what is still a shameful infant mortality rate in this country. And having very positive effects on child health. I think you'll see greater funding for food stamps and school lunch and breakfast programs. Although the latter is a politically safe thing to do, the former is tagged with a negative image of welfare. And so we'll see whether it's possible to do it. But staving off hunger at this moment of economic collapse and foreclosure, I predict will be a priority. Okay, one last quick line, one more line. I believe that some of the policies overseas in creating microfinance loans for small businesses, particularly for women and children, will come home. And you'll see public-private partnerships around that. And with that, (applause) I introduce Daryl Press of the department of government to talk about foreign defense. (applause) - I called Ron Shaiko yesterday, and asked him for just a little bit more clarification about what he wanted today, and he said it's simple. He said describe for us the most serious national security problems facing the United States, and what the solution to it is, and you have five minutes. (laughter) So here we go, but I'll do it by speaking in somewhat broad terms, but I'm happy to speak more in specifics in question and answer. I guess what I would say is that in my view the overarching problem for US national security policy is a broad mismatch between the societal resources we have available for national security problems, and the missions and the obligations that we've decided to take on. That mismatch is the big problem. The problem is exacerbated by the too long and very difficult wars we're currently fighting. But those wars are not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is much deeper than that. And let me try to explain, in order to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, let me just try to describe to you using a couple different lenses, the scope of US military policy around the world. So let me start with a geographic lens, and say imagine the parts of the world, the parts of the globe, where the US military is asked to be prepared for what might be potentially demanding missions. And the answer is, that's the entire world. It's asked to be prepared for demanding missions in the periphery of Europe, on the Korean peninsula, in the Taiwan straight, patrolling the world's oceans, and protecting access to oil, and protecting against instability in major oil producing areas. Now switch lenses for a second, and ask what are the types of operations that the US military is asked to prepare for at any given time. The possibility of counter-proliferation attacks, for example against Iran, the possibility of large-scale stability operations, for example, in case the North Korean government collapses. Humanitarian interventions wherever they might occur. Anti-terror operations around the world. Operations to prevent attacks on oil producers, or oil flows, particularly in the Persian Gulf. And many, many more. The bottom line is the obligations and the missions we've set out for ourselves, that we've decided are very, very important to the United States, are massive. They're truly massive. That's point number one. Point number two, the strains that that definition of interest, that definition of priorities is placing on the US government, and the US military in particular, are not likely to go away any time soon. Even if we can scale back US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan isn't going away any time soon. Both, well I guess I don't have to say both candidates anymore, president-elect Obama has made it very clear that he is still deeply committed to pursing, and in fact, intensifying US efforts in Afghanistan. Furthermore, there's a whole separate problem which was to a large part, the weapons that US military forces have been using in these wars are the weapons that were procured in the 1980's and the 1990's. It was the last round of major procurement from the Cold War those weapons are getting old, they're also wearing out, partly because of these wars, and as you probably can guess, replacing them and especially replacing with their more modern counterparts is going to be a very, very expensive undertaking. And then lastly in this environment there are suggestions for new obligations and new missions. For example, there are suggestions to undertake a major military intervention in the Darfur region, there are suggestions that the United States should support NATO expansion eastward. And so when I look at all this, I have to say, I don't want to be flip but part of me thinks that the way we're thinking about military policy and foreign policy these days is a little bit like the way we've been thinking about our economic policy. In the sense that we're taking on obligations without asking questions about our ability to pay. You know, to carry the analogy one step further, some of these alliance commitments we're issuing feel a little bit like credit default swaps. Which I have to admit, I knew nothing about four weeks ago, and unfortunately many of us now know a little bit too much about them. But in the following sense, is you issue these alliance commitments, you issue these credit default swaps, and they don't feel costly when you issue them. Because it actually doesn't cost you anything on that year's, you know, bottom line. And they might not cost anything for the next year, or the next year, but suddenly if something comes out very badly in the world, you're left holding the bag and the cost to you can be enormous and difficult to contain afterwards. That's the danger of extending alliance commitments, and it's something we should be weighing every time we're considering this. So problem number two is I don't see the strains that we're placing on ourselves, on our military, as declining any time soon. Point number three is I don't think there's a simple solution of throwing lots and lots and lots of new resources at this problem. Because I don't think those resources exist. As all of you know the federal budget is in a state of substantial deficit. And there are also lots of additional claims on the US treasury that are coming right down the pike, there's the healthcare program that it seems most Americans are in favor of, there's actually meeting the commitments to current and future recipients of social security and medicare, there's now possible an Apollo program for energy, or maybe it's a Manhattan program for energy, or both, and so the point is is that I don't think that the gap that exists between the resources required by this current strategy and the strategy itself is going to be solved by just throwing, increasing the defense budget by 50%. Point four is I think that the solution to the extent that there is one, is basically trying to rethink the commitments, rethink the obligations, and rebalance US foreign policy, and place less emphasis on the military tool and more emphasis on other tools. Acknowledging, acknowledging openly, that there are some things in this world that we'd like to have happen that we won't be able to get to have happen. And there are some things in this world that we'd like to prevent that we won't be able to prevent, but nevertheless reblancing US foreign policy. And let me give you five semi-specifics. Number one is phasing out some of the anachronistic alliances that are holdovers from the Cold War. So we didn't do a lot of hard thinking at the end of the Cold War about which of our Cold War alliances will continue to make sense and which ones no longer make sense. That hard thinking is due, and I think if we do that thinking we'll come up with a list of some of those alliances which once made perfect sense, which now are obligations that don't have a lot of payoff for the United States. Number one. Number two, powerfully resist new defense obligations. People will always come to you with a new mission that sounds appealing on its merits, you know, just like in these tough economic times you might really want a new big screen TV or a new suit. The bar ought to be very, very high as to the importance of the mission before you take on any new additional foreign policy and defense commitments. Number three, take a non-military approach to humanitarianism, and what I mean by this is most people, myself included, believe that US values should play a big role, not an exclusive role, but a big role in US foreign policy. But it is almost always a mistake to think that the most efficient, let alone the cheapest tool, of promoting our values and advancing humanitarian causes is with military power. Military power is good for some things, but in terms of advancing our values around the world and promoting humanitarianism, it's almost always inefficient, and it's always a very expensive way of doing that. And we can usually get more bang for the buck in terms of promoting our values through other tools. Number four, return to what was actually both a Reagan and a Carter era approach to the Persian Gulf, basically focusing on an over the horizon, offshore military presence. To protect the most important things to us in the Persian Gulf, but not to be so deeply embedded in the politics and the strife in that rather war torn region. And the last piece of the puzzle is to give US intelligence organizations, rather than the US military, the lead in what people are calling the Global War on Terror. Let me conclude by saying this basically means, it's not a call for pacifism, it's not a call for isolationism, it's a call for a much more discriminate approach to the use of military power, more discriminate than the previous George W. Bush administration. Frankly, more discriminate than the Clinton administration. And then the good news, and there are not many people these days saying that they're going to talk about US national security policy and that they have good news, but the good news and I believe this is true, is that I actually think that in the long run this approach would not only save us some money and help us close the gap, and allow us to spend money on the Apollo program or the Manhattan program, but I honestly think it'll actually in the long term leave us more safe. Let me leave it with that, and I will introduce our next speaker, which is professor Andrew Samwick who is a professor in the economics department and also director of the Rockefeller Center. (applause) - Okay, I'd like to thank all my fellow faculty panelists for their concise statements, the over-under for when I would start talking was eight o'clock. (laughter) So I get the enviable job of talking about fiscal policy, and this is something where there was a lot of rhetoric but not a lot of understanding in the campaign. The thing you heard most about was making the so-called 2001, 2003 tax cuts permanent. And most of that discussion focused on the top marginal tax rates on ordinary income. Which, under Obama's plans would, those reductions would be allowed to lapse, and the top rates of 36 and 39.6 would be reinstated. Senator McCain was campaigning that those like the rates for lower incomes, those tax rates should be kept at their lower levels. They both were going to reinstate the estate tax, to smooth out that little blip. And Obama would do it with the lower exemption and a higher rate above the exemption. McCain would have done it with a somewhat higher exemption and a much lower rate above the exemption. There were also some differences about the capital gains tax rate. Obama proposed a fairly small increase for higher income workers, McCain would have kept it where it is or tried to lower it. It's very important to note that Senator McCain, as president, would have gotten approximately none of that. When confronting a democratically controlled congress, he probably would have been able to do some horse trading, one because you can always do horse trading, and two he really liked to do horse trading when he was a senator. There are some problems common to both candidates approaches, namely that over the last several years, the congress has been working in collusion with the White House to make permanent the set of tax rate reductions on everybody but the highest income folks. And so, as a society, we have to confront this question. Why in 2008, 2009, 2010, should the tax rates for a given amount of income be lower for middle class people than they were 10 years ago? That's a question we'll have to answer in the days coming ahead. Because the government, given what it wants to spend money on, has dramatically less in resources. The second point I'd like to make, is what about those below-the-radar things that candidates talk about seeing if they'll drum up any interest. There was one that candidate Obama, now president-elect Obama was talking about. It's called the Making Work Pay credit. It was a refundable credit of 6.2% of earnings, up to a maximum earnings of $8,100 per worker. What is that 6.2 number? That is half the social security payroll tax. Obama, in the campaign, made no secret of the fact that he thought that was a regressive tax and he would be willing to see other sources of funding come in and replace that. And I think, in the spirit of some of the other things that were talked about in the campaign, he might be leaning toward a green tax swap. What's the green tax swap? Well you have gasoline, something that we all know that we need to conserve on. And you have a tax that you currently apply to it. What if you raised the tax on gasoline, and to demonstrate that you are not doing this to plug the hole in the federal budget that was created through a rather sordid set of activities, you got rid of the revenue by lowering the payroll tax at the margin by a couple of percentage points. That is the so-called green tax swap, and I think it's a winner because you tax more the thing you want to discourage, and you tax less the thing you want to encourage. So if I had any optimism about what we might see, I would place a small bet on the green tax swap. A lot of the healthcare proposals are very interesting, but I thought professor Anthony went through thatin good detail. The big question on everybody's mind is whether the financial market meltdown has put all of this on hold, and you will see if you know that I am kind of a right-of-center person, how I get to outflank a lefty on this one. So it's going to make me feel good. Here is a quote from one of president-elect Obama's more left-leaning economic advisers. "We can't tackle healthcare until we get the economy working, if the economy is weak, how can you make good on the promises you made?" Well I don't actually see why that's a question at all. Suppose we had already had a program, which accomplished some of the increasing coverage that professor Anthony was describing. Suppose miracles upon miracles, that that program had been implemented in the last year, we'll just say it had been implemented last year. And now we come upon our economic hard times. Do we really think that a President Obama would look through the massive federal budget and say you know which program I want to get rid of, I want to get rid of that program that expands coverage for low income and difficult to insure people. That would be ridiculous, he would get laughed out of his own cabinet meeting. So why is it that the fact that that program was not a priority to his predecessor, should determine whether it's a priority that he pursues in his first weeks or months in office? I mean, that's ridiculous, that's what elections are for. It's to help you determine what your priorities are going to be. So I think that would be a colossal mistake. And so I get to outflank somebody on his economic team. (laughter) What should we be looking for, to know whether we're on track? Well, as Joe Biden's dad used to say, show me your budget and I'll show you what you value. There was a nice article by Bruce Barlett this past week, he's a conservative columnist who got thrown out of his think tank for being critical of the Bush administration. The first budget a president submits show us a lot about the president's priorities. And this is a mad scramble, Bruce did us the favor of going back in time and giving us the release dates of new presidents' first budgets, and the title that they put on the cover. So Ronald Reagan, February 18th, 1981, America's New Beginning. George H.W. Bush, February 9th, 1989, see his was a little earlier, because he was sort of already in place, Building a Better America. Bill Clinton, A Vision for Change for America, February 17th, 1993. And George W. Bush, A Blueprint for New Beginnings, February 28th, 2001, you see he wasn't able to hit the ground running there. So sometime around the middle of February, we're going to see that budget. And we're going to get a lot of information about what's in the budget, that will tell us whether President Obama is on track to deliver on campaign promises. I would just close with two other remarks. So this looming recession, what's looming is only the formal declaration of it, is going to induce many more so-called stimulus packages. I confess I've been confused, and I've done this publicly, on radio and in op-eds, it seems to me that the word stimulus now means I'm going to issue debt to finance the purchase of things that people don't really need just to be able to say that I'm spending money. (laughter) And in fact it's not even their money, it's their kids money, I think that's a bad habit to be in. Not everything that you would spend money on has no benefits for your kids, and so it's encouraging to see things like attention to a new energy infrastructure. Something that we heard about at our panel yesterday. Or the crumbling infrastructure, that anyone who drives, or flies, or many other activities, can see. It would be very nice to see the next stimulus package be one in which we're making investments rather than just trying to prop up the consumption of the American consumer. And lastly, we haven't heard much about it, because it has been the third rail, it still is the third rail, but entitlement problems. Medicare, medicaid, and social security continue to be a very politically challenging activity. That does not mean that they have magically resolved themselves, while we were busy not talking about them. The demographic change that's underway in the country, every year brings one more cohort of our more senior workers across this threshold, which is at or near retirement. And thus, in a sense, exempted from sharing in the fiscal burden of putting these programs on a more sound footing. Everyone who works at Dartmouth got, over the last couple of weeks, the news that the cost of health insurance has gone up for us at a rate that is more than the rate of inflation. Those problems about the costs of providing healthcare, those affect medicare like they affect healthcare elsewhere in the economy. And so that's a problem, and in order to know whether we're on track, we're going to have to resume those discussions, perhaps with a very different tone on them but we're going to have to resolve them in short order. Or at least begin to have those conversations. And with that I will end, I will extend my thanks to my faculty panelists, and we will open up the floor for questions. Since we're recording this, please wait for the microphone to get to you. And then ask your question of any of the panelists. I'll ask the panelists to come up here, so it's easy to do that. (applause) Thanks very much. - [Woman] Please step up to the microphone when you answer a question, okay? - Okay, we'll see how this part works. (laughter) - [Monitor] First question? - [Man] Can you hear me okay? I was sort of anxiously awaiting any discussion of housing, housing played obviously a key element in getting us into the situation we have. And there was a lot of discussion that seemed to peter out on how you, quote, solve the problem and I just wondered if any of you think that will be an important ingredient in either a stimulus package or a new legislation proposal from the administration, and if so, how are they going to structure it? - I guess that was me. Yeah I don't think that there's been enough progress made in the thinking of either campaign or anybody inside the beltway or out, as to what single thing the government could do that would avoid the heavy transactions costs of renegotiating all of these mortgages if they are not to go into foreclosure. And so I don't know that the election tells us much about that, we will continue to see declines in house prices. And we will continue to see more pressure on financial institutions to now become owners as opposed to financiers. I don't think there is an answer that would could affirmatively state. This is what's coming, I think we're going to continue learning. - [Man] At the risk of coming back to the same question I asked you the last time. I didn't think that was the right forum, but we're clearly getting evidence that there's a flight from the dollar. You're clearly getting evidence that long rates, both investment grade bonds and the government bonds themselves, are increasing in rate, mortgage rates have increased. There's clearly a great fear about inflation. I know the last time you felt that was something that short rates and some of the other indicators said was not going to be a problem. But the short rates are really a reflection of the flight of fear. Everybody running at the treasury bills. Can you give me another holler on this subject? I don't see how you spend all this money, print all this money, and we still stay away from a real inflation danger. - Yeah, as I recall our last conversation, what we could assert was that by the Fed's actions in pushing the fed funds rate so low, it was clear that they were not particularly worried about inflation. I think at that time I shared my fear that this is eventually, you know, the last straw in any country trying to get a hold of it's financial problems of this sort is to simply monetize its debt. And I don't think we're out of the woods on that. I just don't really have a glide path to describe what will happen between now and the moment that that could begin. That would tell you whether we're on the track to see that. I think inflation does remain that sort of a risk. I'd like to see what the decline in oil prices is going to mean, whether that could be sustained over the course of a year, that'd be the next indicator I'd look at. - [Man] I'm wondering about how easy it might be for Obama to get his initiatives passed in congress and whether 60 really would make a huge difference, or regardless, whether it's 56, 57 democrats, 58, will congress give him a really large window, not a large window, but a window at least in the beginning to sort of pass his initiatives to see if they work. - That one sounds like it's for me. I think we're all conditioned to think about the 100 days. And Annelise's references to Roosevelt simply accentuate that. Many people who think that the 100 days mantra is a trap for presidents, and the most important thing for Obama is to have a few priorities and follow through on them, so I think the important thing for him to do is to consult with congress. And anticipate, of these three priorities, which one has the greatest likelihood of passing easily and quickly? So a lot of whether congress gives him what he wants depends on whether he's able to frame priorities in a way that congress wants to go along. A famous presidential scholar said the power of the presidency is the power to persuade. And what presidents are really doing is engaging in extensive bargaining about what the priorities of the government are going to be. So it's not, we came to think of the relationship between congress and the presidency, during the Bush years, as a rubber stamp. President comes up with something, he goes to Capital Hill, he actually doesn't go to Capital Hill, he brings Capital Hill, a few people, up to him and says here's what we're doing, stamp it. Congress isn't going to go for that. Even though they've got the majority, and they want to support their president, but as I indicated in my opening remarks there are a lot of people who are frustrated who want to exercise power they want to reclaim some of the prerogative. So Obama will get what he wants from congress, if he frames it in a way that his interest and their interest coincide. - In the United States auto industry, among other places, I think that it will happen in academia, it will happen in national labs, it will happen in large and maybe, perhaps especially small companies. Just going back to the auto case, in the Clinton administration, who actually was rather ineffectual at moving forward aggressive energy R&D, they did have a several hundred million dollar program entitled the partnership for, it was alternately called next or new generation vehicles, which targeted making a Ford Taurus equivalent that got 70 miles per gallon, that program was promptly scuttled at the end of the Clinton administration. And one can only wonder how much better off the auto industry would be had it continued. So I think that the research infrastructure with respect to R&D specifically, and all of its components, can absorb something of the size that's being proposed. And that size may be diminished somewhat from imagination to implementation. Which will make the absorption easier. - [Man] I'd like to ask a question, this might require two professors to answer. One possibly being you again, so anyway. I'm really curious to know about how long it would take to implement and get fully working a system of cabin trade on emissions. This is something that both possible presidents McCain and Obama endorsed, and it is something that we literally cannot wait much longer on if we are to avoid the largest consequences of climate change. That said, I'd like to consider the economic principle as well, that we would effectively if we just restrained ourselves in our country we would export our pollution to China and India where they won't have the the same cabin trade standards. So how do we made this economically viable on the international sense, and how do we implement it how would you see Obama doing that, quickly? - Yikes! (laughter) The equity issues and extent of international obligations that are going to be necessary to be negotiated are extremely challenging. And that's one thing going back to your how long question, I think there's going to be, I would guess, 18 months worth of very difficult negotiation with an uncertain outcome. On the other hand, John Holdren who was on campus briefly about a year and a half ago, and is about as knowledgeable a person as they come on this question, expressed the opinion that when the United States indicates sincere willingness to act, that they want to be part of this sort of thing. And it was his opinion that the recalcitrance of the US to this has been the limiting factor and so we will see, to some extent, the release of a dam. What becomes the limiting factor then, and how well we will do, my crystal ball is frankly not clear and good enough to say. I recognize the challenges implicit in your question. I think everybody recognizes, and nobody knows quite how it's going to come out. But for those who hope to see the mechanisms to give an economic value to carbon, I think the thought that there will be a more universal perception of urgency is what they're banking on. - [Man] If all of the 700 or 750 billion dollars in the bailout package haven't been committed by January 20th, can we expect to see any change in how the balance will be expended? - That's a good question, I think that there were not a lot of supporters of the troubled asset relief program as it was originally presented by the treasury secretary among the democrats. I think they were reluctantly going along because that's what had been proposed to them. And not going along was the worst thing that the leadership could have done in that case. When the UK decided that they would make direct capital injections into their banks, then it became pretty clear that we would do the same thing here, and that met with more approval up and down the electoral spectrum. So I suspect that if there are any of those purchases of troubled assets directly off the balance sheet that are still going to be done even in these last couple of months, that those will stop. And to the extent that any money is being invested, it will be in the form of these preferred equity shares. Hopefully with more restrictions on payments to common equity holders. And hopefully at some slightly higher rates of interest. So it doesn't have to be such a subsidy. - [Man] On the issue of US foreign policy, it seems that the international community is much more enthused about a President Obama than a President McCain, and I was wondering to what extent, if any, that would affect the Obama administration's ability to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Because it seems to me that the Obama and McCain campaigns differed more on means than on ends when it came to US foreign policy objectives. - It's a good question, Brian. My sense is that the differences between the Obama administration and the Bush administration, in their willingness and their desire for cooperation with allies is a degree of magnitude rather than, it's not a dichotomous issue, it's not that the Bush administration was disinterested in having alliance support and having allies sign on to missions, it was that on a series of issues the Bush administration was so certain about what they wanted to achieve that they would rather do it with the support and assistance of allies and were willing to do it without it when necessary. My sense is the same is true of the Obama administration, that the difference is not that as much as the fact that Obama administration probably has fewer objectives that will run squarely against the interests and desires of the allies. So, when issues come up and principally I'm thinking about Iran, where the Obama administration might have to make very, very difficult decisions about what to do if they finally come to the conclusion that negotiations with the Europeans and Iran, if it is the case that those come to no useful fruition, the Obama administration is going to come to a conclusion about what it wants to do. And it's made some tough talk in the campaign about and Iranian nuclear program being unacceptable. At other times people who might have positions in the Obama administration have taken a position which, frankly, I support, which says that a nuclear-armed Iran is highly undesirable but acceptable because we can deter them. That's a position I support, I ultimately don't know because you've heard both things from people who are likely to be close to this administration, what they will decide. If they decide to use military force, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a very small coalition of the willing. So at the end of the day I'd say, I think the difference in how both administrations are likely to approach allies is a little bit smaller than it's actually often portrayed to be. Because both would love to have allies sign on to make missions they want to do. There still will be some issues where we might, we the Obama administration, not me, the Obama administration might differ strongly from the preferences of allies. And I think in those circumstances, the Obama administration will do what they pledged to do, which was to put their perceptions of US national interest and US national security first. And that might lead to some of the same divisions that you see. - [Moderator] We'll take one more question. - [Woman] A comment and a question for professor Lynd, you indicated that auto companies might well be worked into an Apollo program on energy, and I just wanted to comment that during World War II, automobile companies switched to making airplanes and they did it very fast too. But also I wondered why have US automobile companies been so reluctant to make any increases, mandatory increases, in MPG when they should shoot for something much bigger. I mean, they've been so teensy and so incremental since 2000 I've been driving a car that gets 50, 60, 70 miles per gallon. And they've known how to make these cars for many, many years, now why don't they mandate a big change? - Were you asking at the end why don't the automakers mandate a big change? - Why doesn't our congress mandate a big change? - Well this has been a battleground issue for about 20 years, and I saw it up close when I served on a policy advisory committee to the Clinton administration in '94 and '95. We had 30 stakeholders, including 5 car companies. We thought we were going to get somewhere after a yearlong process, and at the end the five car companies went out of the room. They caucused, they came back in and they said we probably haven't made our position clear enough. Any policy that has the four consecutive capital letters CAFE, or any functional equivalent attached to a numerical value of greenhouse gas emissions, even it's in an appendix, we will not sign. Whereupon the environmentalists walked out of the room. Literally, and so all I'm saying is that this is, goes long and deep, the auto industry's traditional arguments have been twofold. One has been based on customer demand. That they have, this is not their chief argument anymore, but as far as how they got here. Has been that they don't see that they, they believed they could maintain demand for larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles. And the second one has been based on competitiveness. They basically said look, our market share is going to be in the less fuel-efficient vehicles. Now recently none other than the chairmain of General Motors said the trend towards more efficient, smaller vehicles is, quote, permanent. So I don't think there is this element of denying reality. There's also a lot of desperate circumstances in the auto industry that have nothing do with, at least nothing immediately to do with this. They have to deal with other considerations. So there is the obviously potential for some form of federal assistance with strings attached. How that will play out is not quite clear, but I mean, the US auto industry has never seen it, has really clearly perceived it to not be in their competitive interest to see mileage standards aggressively raised. And they know that's where the world's going, I think they'd like to get some help to get there. (applause)

Overview

United States House of Representatives elections in Georgia, 2008
Party Votes Percentage Seats before Seats after +/–
Republican 1,883,633 50.34% 7 7 0
Democratic 1,858,090 49.66% 6 6 0
Others 309 0.0% 0 0 0
Valid votes - -%
Invalid or blank votes - -%
Totals 3,742,032 100.00% 13 13
Voter turnout 72.01%

All information came from the Secretary of State of Georgia website.

Match-up summary

District Incumbent 2008 status Democratic Republican Write-in(s)
1 Jack Kingston Re-election Bill Gillespie Jack Kingston
2 Sanford Bishop Re-election Sanford Bishop Lee Ferrell
3 Lynn Westmoreland Re-election Stephen Camp Lynn Westmoreland Loretta VanPelt
4 Hank Johnson Re-election Hank Johnson Loren Christopher Collins
Faye Coffield
Jacob Perasso
5 John Lewis Re-election John Lewis Shira Kash
Jeanne Fitzmaurice
6 Tom Price Re-election Bill Jones Tom Price
7 John Linder Re-election Doug Heckman John Linder
8 Jim Marshall Re-election Jim Marshall Rick Goddard
9 Nathan Deal Re-election Jeff Scott Nathan Deal
10 Paul Broun Re-election Bobby Saxon Paul Broun
11 Phil Gingrey Re-election Bud Gammon Phil Gingrey
12 John Barrow Re-election John Barrow John Stone
13 David Scott Re-election David Scott Deborah Honeycutt

District breakdown

District 1

Incumbent Republican Jack Kingston (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee Bill Gillespie (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 1st congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Jack Kingston (incumbent) 165,890 66.5
Democratic Bill Gillespie 83,444 33.5
Total votes 249,334 100.00
Republican hold

District 2

2008 Georgia's 2nd congressional district election

← 2006
2010 →
 
Nominee Sanford Bishop Lee Ferrell
Party Democratic Republican
Popular vote 158,435 71,351
Percentage 68.9% 31.1%

County results

U.S. Representative before election

Sanford Bishop
Democratic

Elected U.S. Representative

Sanford Bishop
Democratic

Democratic incumbent Sanford Bishop (campaign website) won against Republican nominee Lee Ferrell (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Democrat'.

Georgia's 2nd congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic Sanford Bishop (incumbent) 158,435 68.9
Republican Lee Ferrell 71,351 31.1
Total votes 229,786 100.00
Democratic hold

District 3

2008 Georgia's 8th congressional district election

← 2006
2010 →
 
Nominee Jim Marshall Rick Goddard
Party Democratic Republican
Popular vote 157,241 117,446
Percentage 57.2% 42.8%

County results

U.S. Representative before election

Jim Marshall
Democratic

Elected U.S. Representative

Jim Marshall
Democratic

Republican incumbent Lynn Westmoreland (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee Stephen Camp (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 3rd congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Lynn Westmoreland (incumbent) 225,055 65.7
Democratic Stephen Camp 117,522 34.3
Independent Loretta VanPelt (write-in) 3 0.0
Total votes 342,580 100.00
Republican hold

District 4

Freshman Democratic incumbent Hank Johnson (campaign website) was unopposed on the ballot and easily defeated three write-in challengers. CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Democrat'.

Georgia's 4th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic Hank Johnson (incumbent) 224,494 99.9
Independent Loren Christopher Collins (write-in) 159 0.1
Independent Faye Coffield (write-in) 35 0.0
Independent Jacob Perasso (write-in) 6 0.0
Total votes 224,694 100.00
Democratic hold

District 5

Democratic incumbent John Lewis (campaign website) ran unopposed. CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Democrat'.

Georgia's 5th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic John Lewis (incumbent) 231,368 100.0
Independent Shira Kash 81 0.0
Independent Jeanne Fitzmaurice 25 0.0
Total votes 231,474 100.00
Democratic hold

District 6

Republican incumbent Tom Price (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee Bill Jones (campaign website), an Air Force veteran and high-tech businessman. CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 6th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Tom Price (incumbent) 231,520 68.5
Democratic Bill Jones 106,551 31.5
Total votes 338,071 100.00
Republican hold

District 7

Republican incumbent John Linder (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee Doug Heckman (campaign website), a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 7th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican John Linder (incumbent) 209,354 62.0
Democratic Doug Heckman 128,159 38.0
Total votes 337,513 100.00
Republican hold

District 8

Democratic incumbent Jim Marshall (campaign website) won against Republican nominee and retired Major General Rick Goddard (campaign website).

Marshall survived a challenge from former Republican congressman Mac Collins in 2006 by 1,752 votes and was expected to face a tough re-election bid in 2008. Some thought this might prompt him to challenge U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss in Georgia's Senate race, but he decided to stay in the House. Marshall won easily in the primary against music teacher Robert Nowak (campaign website).

On the Republican side, retired Air Force Major General Rick Goddard announced that he would run.[3] His background may have great appeal in a district with a large number of veterans, though Marshall's own military background and well-established credibility on military issues may cancel this out. Other potential Republican candidates were state Senator Ross Tolleson, state Senator Cecil Staton and former congressman Mac Collins, but Goddard ran unopposed.[citation needed]

The present district, which was implemented starting with the 2006 election, would have given George W. Bush 61% of the vote in 2004 (CPVI=R+8).

Georgia's 8th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic Jim Marshall (incumbent) 157,241 57.2
Republican Rick Goddard 117,446 42.8
Total votes 274,687 100.00
Democratic hold

District 9

Republican incumbent Nathan Deal won against Democratic nominee Jeff Scott (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 9th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Nathan Deal (incumbent) 217,493 75.5
Democratic Jeff Scott 70,537 24.5
Total votes 288,030 100.00
Republican hold

District 10

Republican incumbent Paul Broun (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee and Iraq War veteran Bobby Saxon (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

In a 2007 special election, physician Paul Broun, a Republican with libertarian views, won a stunning upset in a non-partisan runoff. On July 15, Broun fended off his Republican primary challenger and state Representative Barry Fleming 71.0% to 29.0%.

Georgia's 10th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Paul Broun (incumbent) 177,265 60.7
Democratic Bobby Saxon 114,638 39.3
Total votes 291,903 100.00
Republican hold

District 11

Republican incumbent Phil Gingrey (campaign website) won against Democratic nominee Bud Gammon (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Safe Republican'.

Georgia's 11th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Phil Gingrey (incumbent) 204,082 68.2
Democratic Bud Gammon 95,220 31.8
Total votes 299,302 100.00
Republican hold

District 12

Democratic incumbent John Barrow (campaign website) won against Republican John Stone (campaign website). CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Democrat Favored'.

Barrow won against State Senator Regina D. Thomas in the Democratic primary. In 2006, John Barrow won by only 864 votes against the Republican nominee, former Representative Max Burns. Barrow had defeated then-incumbent Burns in 2004 with 52% of the vote, but in 2007 Burns accepted a job with North Georgia College and State University.

On the Republican side, radio announcer and former congressional aide John Stone won against mechanical engineer and former presidential candidate Ray McKinney and Ben Crystal.

The present district, which was implemented starting with the 2006 election, would have given John Kerry 51% in 2004 (CPVI=D+2).

Georgia's 12th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic John Barrow (incumbent) 164,562 66.0
Republican John Stone 84,773 34.0
Total votes 249,335 100.00
Democratic hold

District 13

Democratic incumbent David Scott (campaign website) won against Republican nominee Deborah Honeycutt (campaign website), who also ran unsuccessfully in 2006. CQ Politics forecasted the race as 'Democrat Favored'. Scott won against Donzella James in the Democratic primary election.

Georgia's 13th congressional district election, 2008[2]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic David Scott (incumbent) 205,919 69.0
Republican Deborah Honeycutt 92,320 31.0
Total votes 298,239 100.00
Democratic hold

See also

References

  1. ^ Unofficial And Incomplete Results of the Tuesday, July 15, 2008 General Primary Election Georgia Secretary of State.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Georgia Election Results - Official Results of the Tuesday, November 04, 2008 General Election". Secretary of State of Georgia. February 18, 2009. Archived from the original on April 15, 2016. Retrieved February 26, 2009.
  3. ^ "macon.com". Archived from the original on June 13, 2007. Retrieved July 20, 2008.

External links

Preceded by
2006 elections
United States House elections in Georgia
2008
Succeeded by
2010 elections
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