Take These Broken Wings
I'm out of here for about a week and a half, starting late on Thursday the 23rd, for a vacation in Italy with my wife. If all goes to plan, when I get back on the evening of April 3, the Phillies will be 1-0 and the temperature will actually reflect the season known as "spring," rather than this 30-something degree unpleasantness we've had for most of this month.

But while I'm actually feeling pretty good about the Phillies right now--though, in deference to The Navigator, I'm not making any predictions--my other favorite team isn't looking so strong. I speak, of course, about the Philadelphia Eagles.

In sports, I believe that when teams enjoy a sustained run of success, they get arrogant and come to believe they're smarter than the competition. One bad year is too easily dismissed as an aberration; sometimes it takes a half a decade of regular beatings for humility to return. Sometimes--think of the 1980s-era Phillies, who didn't even start to smarten up until a decade-plus on the receiving end of ass-kickings--it takes a lot longer than that.

As Rich Hoffman wrote in Wednesday's Philadelphia Daily News, this year we're going to find out whether the Eagles really are as smart as they think they are. Right now, my strong hunch is that they aren't, and that we're more likely to see more sub-.500 seasons than a return to the top of the NFC East. The 2006 Eagles right now look like a seven-win team to me, given the issues of age, health, and quality of division opponents. And even that might be optimistic.

Here's an easy way to think about it:

1) Thanks to advancing age and accumulated injuries, the remaining players from the team that went to Super Bowl XXXIX, by and large, won't be as good in 2006 as they were in 2004.

2) Of everyone else, pending the April draft, we've probably lost more starter-level talent (Owens, Burgess, Simon, Chad Lewis, Mayberry--all of whom were solid or better for that team) than we've brought on from 2004 til now (Howard, Gaffney, Barber, Brown, Patterson). If Jon Runyan signs elsewhere, the gap widens further.

3) The division opponents are all now considerably better than they were in 2004. None look to me like probably Super Bowl teams, but all three are probably 8-11 win clubs. If the defensive players Parcells drafted last spring develop as expected, Julius Jones stays healthy, and TO more or less behaves, the Cowboys might be as strong as any club in the NFC. (Dear god, I'm not sure I've ever written a more galling sentence.)

4) Andy Reid's regime has not been so good in the draft--or, more to the point, developing the talent brought in from the draft--that we should hang our hopes on what happens in late April.

Another way to think about it is that NFL clubs win by outplaying their opponents on the lines and at the skill positions. Again, just thinking about the NFC East, the Eagles come up short in both dimensions. For playmakers on offense, they've got Donovan McNabb, Brian Westbrook, Reggie Brown, Jafar Gaffney, and LJ Smith; Dallas has Drew Bledsoe, Jones, TO, Terry Glenn, and Jason Witten. I'll take McNabb over Bledsoe; do the Eagles look better anywhere else? You could make a case for Westbrook over Jones, but the bigger, younger guy is likely the better bet going forward.

Up the Jersey Turnpike, the Giants have Eli Manning, Tiki Barber, Plaxico Burress, Amani Toomer and Jeremy Shockey. Again, McNabb's my preferred quarterback, though that gap will close. Otherwise, it's all Blue. Down I-95, the Redskins have Mark Brunell, Clinton Portis, Santana Moss, Brandon Lloyd or Antwaan Randle-El, and Chris Cooley. This is a recording: McNabb (if healthy) is the best quarterback in the division. And you could argue that LJ Smith is a better tight end than Cooley (who's listed as a fullback on the 'Skins' depth chart, for what that's worth).

Overall, I think it's clear that the Eagles have the worst overall talent at the offensive skill positions in the NFC East. And it's not particularly close; while McNabb is pretty clearly better than either of the veteran passers in Dallas and Washington, both guys can manage a game just fine--which minimizes the difference. Now, if the Eagles had a clearly superior offensive line, maybe that would make up for the deficit at the skill positions. Would you argue that they do? I sure wouldn't: the sacks-allowed and rush-per-carry stats peg their line (admittedly depleted by injuries) as substantially worse than either New York's or Washington's, and just a bit better than Dallas. With former Pro Bowler Runyan possibly leaving and fellow tackle Tra Thomas coming off a serious back injury, there might be more room for decline than improvement.

Rumor this afternoon (Thursday) is that Runyan might come back after all... but I'm out of time, and might (or might not) talk about the defense when I return. Suffice it to say that I don't think things are quite as bad on that side of the ball, but if they don't take a defensive tackle with their first draft pick, I'll be pretty upset.

My Nomination
...for one-trick political site of the year: right here.

What's particularly nice about this is that any Democrat this side of Jim Traficant (hell, maybe even him) probably could run against Cruella and successfully raise as much money as s/he needed. Unless Harris uses those same mad computer skillz that improperly purged likely Democratic voters from the Florida rolls in 2000 to access Bill Gates' Swiss bank account, her money ultimately won't matter.

Of course, it also doesn't help that she's implicated (though not facing imminent legal action) in one of this year's many Republican lobbying scandals, or that she's trailing incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson by 10 points or so.

Bush Gets One Right (sort of)
Today's New York Times informs us that President Bush is about to embark upon another of those "series of major policy speeches" on Iraq. Though he has no new initiatives to unveil, and the ongoing drumbeat of bad news from that troubled region seems to present a risk of (yet more) severe political embarrassment in a second term that's well on the way to setting a standard of substantial and stylistic political failure, Bush evidently is set to make one meta-point that I think is well taken: America can't simply disengage from the rest of the world.

[S]tarting on Monday, just a few days shy of the third anniversary of Mr. Bush's order to topple Saddam Hussein, the president will begin an effort to explain his Iraq strategy anew in the changed environment of increased sectarian killings.

He acknowledged on Saturday that "many of our fellow citizens" are "now wondering if the entire mission is worth it."

But rather than simply delve into the familiar talk about the need to root out terrorists abroad so they cannot strike Americans here, the White House plans to have Mr. Bush expand his discussion of the need for the United States to embrace a new role in the world, even if that means explaining the benefits of globalization to a nation that does not appear to be in a mood to hear that message.
...
A search of the White House Web site confirms that Mr. Bush, who in the days before he took office kept the take-no-prisoners speeches of Teddy Roosevelt on a table at his ranch, made little mention of "globalization" for much of his first five years in office, even when European leaders brought it up.

Asked once, several years ago, about his aversion to the topic, one of his senior aides said Mr. Bush associated the word with "mushy Clintonianism."

"It ranks up there with 'nation-building,' " he added.

No longer. Now Mr. Bush is moving into a new phase of his presidency, not by choice or natural inclination, it seems, but by necessity. Mr. Bush changed his tone on nation-building several years ago.

As the invasion turned to occupation, he emphasized the spread of democracy. But even that talk, especially during his re-election campaign, had a unilateralist subtext: the schools and polling places were open because the hammer of the American military made it possible.

His new theme is different, because it is all about interdependence. Two of his aides say the near defeat of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Congress last summer — it passed by one vote, after arm-twisting by the president brought just enough Republicans back into the fold — jolted Mr. Bush into recognizing a new retreat from the world by his own party.

There are actually two things to like here. Globalization, first of all, is a fact of life whether we embrace it or not. Bush is very much with the mainstream of economic opinion when he says (as is noted later in this article) that we should be excited, not solely apprehensive, at what "a 300-million-person market of middle-class citizens here in India" can mean for the sale of American-made products.

(The corollary, which unfortunately Bush doesn't seem to grasp at the policymaking level, is that to take advantage of this emerging market, you need to continuously cultivate a world-class knowledge workforce that will create things of interest and value to that market--as well as to this one. Thus, government disinvestment in financial assistance for higher education and research and development within numerous fields of inquiry is ultimately self-defeating, no matter how happy it makes Grover Norquist when you cut the "investment budget" to fund his tax cut.)

Given how badly Bush has failed to explain anything with non-emotional arguments (see: Social Security "reform," Medicare Part D, Iraq since the '04 election), it seems like a stretch to believe that he'll be able to make this case. It can be done, however, and my guess is that as the 2008 election draws closer, there will be both Democrats and Republicans who successfully explain the issue. (He could also just ask Bill Clinton to do it.)

Bush's real problem is with the other half of the "engagement" argument: using America's power beyond our borders. When you've lost William F. Buckley on Iraq, who's left to count on? The administration's toxic mix of dishonesty, rhetorical incoherence, and just piss-poor implementation is what's really behind the rising neo-isolationist impulse, and this is Bad with a capital B for the country: though Saddam was not a threat, and we should have known as much, Iran could well prove to present a major danger to world peace and stability as well as American interests. Pakistan, too, is a nuclear-armed dictatorship with radical religious elements who want to rule; if Musharraf falls, it's hard to predict what would happen.

Rather than either acting unilaterally, as we essentially did in Iraq, or retreating from the world's troubled areas, we should be using every instrument in the toolbox of governance--sanctions, coalition-building, and force as a last result--to advance both our interests and ideals. By just about any standard, George H.W. Bush did this successfully in both managing the first Gulf War and helping to build a stable post-Cold War order; he had his failures as well, with China after the 1989 crackdown, the Balkans, and in places like East Timor, but on balance he was a successful foreign policy president.

And, terrible though she was as National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice has actually done a decent job at this since taking over the State Department--working through the EU on Iran, reaching out to China and Russia as well, trying to mediate disputes elsewhere in the Middle East. That's a pretty good start. The hard political sell, however, will come if/when those measures fail and some use of force is called for. I don't know which party will carry the neo-isolationist banner at that point--but whoever is in front will have a much stronger case because of George Bush's failures in Iraq.

Let There Be More Darkness
In the not quite six years I've been researching and writing on social policy issues, the most difficult but also most rewarding thing I've done was the Working Poor Families Project. Toward the end of 2004, CUF and our partners at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy released a report titled "Between Hope and Hard Times," about low-income working families in New York State and how government policies in a number of areas, from post-secondary financial aid to economic development investments to income supports like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Unemployment Insurance, helped or hindered them in their efforts to get ahead. The basic premise of the project, which was supported by three major national philanthropic foundations, struck me then and now as deeply resonant with the whole American idea: that families who work hard and live right should enjoy a measure of economic security.

We found that despite the general prosperity of the last decade-plus and some highly laudable programs at the state and local levels, the numbers of low-income working families in the state have increased. (A forthcoming update brief, to be released later this month, shows that this trend unfortunately has accelerated in the 18 months since we issued the full report.) The question we couldn't answer to my satisfaction, though, was this: are today's working poor substantially the same people who had jobs but struggled to make ends meet five, ten, twenty years ago? The problem, in other words, isn't necessarily poverty: it's opportunity and mobility. One state agency we engaged with in the course of researching the report presented us with a Census study from the late 1990s indicating that economic mobility remains high; we also found a study by two Federal Reserve economists that strongly suggested that mobility had sharply declined since the 1970s. In the report, we wrote that "for the state to truly gauge how its anti-poverty policies are performing, we must have better information."

So it comes as a disappointment, but not a huge surprise, that the Bush administration proposes to do away with one of the federal government's more effective programs that provide *any* information on this subject: the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation. Ironically, the study that suggested the enduring strength of economic mobility was a product of SIPP data. Follows here a little description, of both the program itself and how its demise has been presented:

The SIPP is the only major longitudinal survey that tracks the same families over time. While it has a representative sample that allows it to be used to examine issues affecting the whole population, it over samples low income households, which makes it especially useful for examining the impact of TANF, Medicaid, and other anti-poverty programs. Ostensibly, the reason for eliminating the SIPP is to save the $40 million annual cost of fielding the survey (@ 6 hours of the Iraq war).

Usually, plans to alter or eliminate major surveys are floated well in advance in order to get input from the community of researchers, policy makers, and advocates that rely on the survey. This plan was crafted in the dark of night and kept secret until the 2007 budget was released. Perhaps the secrecy was needed to keep us safe from the terrorists, but this does not seem like best path for producing reliable data.

To put it mildly, $40 million is not a lot of money in a multi-trillion dollar federal budget. It's the dime you find in the couch cushion, if that. For that matter, it's a pretty miniscule fraction of the money we spend on the programs SIPP helps us understand better: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the federal welfare program that was recently stealth-reauthorized when the Republicans inserted it within a budget reconciliation bill (a DeLay special: enact something that could never pass on its merits by tying it to a measure necessary to keep government functioning), has been flat-funded since Clinton first signed it in 1996, and we still spend something like $16 billion on it, plus state matching funds. Medicaid, the growth of which is squeezing state budgets from coast to coast, consumes a much bigger share of the federal budget.

A reflexive right-wing response to this whole problem might just be, "Fuck it--we should eliminate all those programs anyway." (In fact, I think one of our visiting trolls pretty much wrote that a few weeks ago.) Putting aside the human consequences of such a switch, the truth is that it's not happening: not now, not ever. Even the most rabid Republican governor would foul his wool britches without the billions in federal aid to fund income support and social safety net programs; they want more, not less. For that matter, consider poor Wal-Mart; without Medicaid, they'd be unable to sustain a workforce. The point is that these programs aren't just handouts; they're pivotal to the functioning of the U.S. economy. (Also keep in mind that majorities of the poor and near-poor work; this isn't your grandpa's Cadillac welfare queen, not that she ever really existed as much more than a trope for haters.)

So we're going to have these programs, and we're going to spend billions of dollars on them. The question is whether we want to keep the tools to evaluate them, see where they're helping and where they can be stretched farther and where they're being wasted--or whether we'd just prefer to remain in blissful ignorance, out of some notion that the less we know about those on the economic margin, the less we have to worry about them.