Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez — chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee, as well as former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee — says this about the idea of suspending the federal gas tax for three months this summer a solution to high gas prices:

“The call by Sens. Clinton and McCain to temporarily suspend the federal tax on gasoline is a short-sighted stunt that will hurt consumers and do nothing to reduce the price of gas.

“American consumers and our economy need a real solution to the energy crisis, not an empty trick. You can run cars on a lot of different fuels, but snake oil isn’t one of them.

“In the hopes of winning votes, the Senators are preying on consumers’ justified anxiety about the economy without offering a solution to their real problems. There’s nothing in our history to indicate that oil companies will pass on any savings to the consumer. So despite the McCain and Clinton gas tax holiday, the price at the pump will continue to rise and oil companies will take even more of the profit.

“My constituents are reeling from the highest gas prices in the country. But they understand that we can only break the oil chokehold and bring prices down by investing in highways and mass transit, new technology, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

“Siphoning off the political energy from these necessary steps to focus instead on a plan that some political consultants favor is cynical politics. Taking a break from the federal gas tax and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it produces is harmful to the long-term economic well-being of our country.

“Sen. Clinton knows it is not easy to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies. We have been trying to rein in record oil profits for years, and the House has repeatedly passed legislation to roll unjustified federal oil subsidies and invest instead in renewable energy – but President Bush and Senate Republicans have blocked us. Some of the subsidies we are trying to eliminate started under President Bill Clinton’s administration.

“Sen. Clinton is trying to intimidate members of Congress into validating her bad policy prescriptions. Congress should reject her and Sen. McCain’s idea. Relief from soaring gas prices will only come from smart investments and real change in our energy policy.”

Also, as I’d noted last week, it could cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs. Today, I see the American Road and Transportation Builders Association estimates that number at 310,750 — including 23,107 jobs right here in California.

And for what? Check out this calculator to see how much you would save. It ain’t much… and that’s assuming most prominent economists are dead wrong when they say demand and prices would simply rise to about the same levels they’re at now.

But, hey, what do those economists know, anyway?

Will Jerry McNerney throw his superdelegate support to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama while the race is still on, or will he stay mum?

Sure, I’m picking on him a bit. He’s not the only East Bay Congressman who has not yet made the choice – Pete Stark hasn’t, either – but McNerney’s the one with the most to lose.

Stark, D-Fremont, was elected to the House in 1972 and has been there ever since; he now chairs the powerful Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. His 13th Congressional District is registered 53.6 percent Democrat, 18.5 percent Republican. In his past four re-elections, he won with 70.5 percent in 2000, 71.1 percent in 2002, 71.7 percent in 2004 and 74.9 percent in 2006 – stronger each time.

In February’s presidential primary, Democrats in Stark’s district went 57.3 percent for Clinton, 38.3 percent for Obama. But although Stark’s temper and (ahem) plain speech sometimes get him into hot water, he clearly has little to lose in endorsing either candidate.

On the other hand, McNerney, D-Pleasanton, is a freshman who’s among the National Republican Congressional Committee’s top targets for unseating this year.

In 2006 he toppled House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, in a 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent race. Pombo was beset with accusations of ethics problems, and McNerney was buoyed by a flood of grassroots activists who came in from outside the district to knock doors, work the phones, etc.

Today, McNerney’s 11th Congressional District – mostly in San Joaquin County, but with swaths of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties – is registered 41.3 percent Republican; 38.5 percent Democrat; and 16.6 percent decline-to-state. As of March 31, he had more campaign money in the bank – $1,153,586 – than his Republican challenger, Dean Andal – $531,817 – but the race is young and nobody expects a Stark-style cakewalk in McNerney’s district.

Democrats in McNerney’s district in February voted 54.1 percent for Clinton, 39.9 percent for Obama. McNerney in early March told the San Francisco Chronicle he would “make a decision when I have to… I’m going to let the voters decide for themselves.

Surely he has formed his own opinion by now, right? It’s hard to believe that any member of Congress hasn’t by now, after all that’s been said and done. It’s easy to believe, however, that McNerney doesn’t want to make a choice now which could put him at odds either with a majority of his district’s voters, or with the activists who helped him win that seat, or with the eventual nominee; it’s easy to believe he doesn’t want his words now to show up in Andal’s ads this fall.

But the time may be drawing nigh.

The latest Associated Press figures show Clinton still leads Obama in superdelegate endorsements (268 to 248) but Obama leads in overall delegates (pledged and the officially unpledged superdelegates), 1,736 to 1,602; a candidate needs 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination. The superdelegate contest has gotten hot in recent days; much is being made of former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew’s superdelegate defection from Clinton to Obama, yet poll numbers show Clinton resurgent.

So, Congressman McNerney – will you play it safe and wait until the nomination is a fait accompli, or will you speak out about who you believe should be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States?

The Republican National Committee launched this new Web video ad today criticizing Barack Obama for opposing the three-month “gas-tax holiday” advocated by John McCain and Hillary Clinton:

McCain wants to pay for the tax cut by shifting money from the general fund (already in deficit), while Clinton wants to take it out of the oil companies’ pockets. But no matter the bookkeeping, this RNC ad fails to mention that economists familiar with tax policy and gas prices say the plan is actually a holiday from the real world.

This gas tax supports a federal highway fund that’s already $3.4 billion in the hole. By some estimates, every dollar invested in highway infrastructre brings $5.40 in ecomomic benefits: less traffic, better safety, less vehicle maintenance spending (e.g., your shocks and struts). And the federal government says every $1 billion in highway spending creates almost 35,000 jobs; this proposed gas-tax cut would slash $9 billion from federal highway coffers, so that’s about 315,000 jobs.

On a more practical note, it probably wouldn’t lower gas prices all that much anyway. Economists say it would lead to more gas consumption, and an increase in demand will probably drive the taxless price up to near where it is with the tax now. Meanwhile, people will drive more, meaning more greenhouse gas emissions.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, former chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers: “I don’t know any prominent economist who favors this McCain-Clinton proposal. More common is the reaction of a friend of mine (a veteran of the Clinton administration) who calls the idea ‘ludicrous.’ ”

Leonard Burman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute and director of the Tax Policy Center, (via Mankiw’s blog): “Yesterday I was on the NewsHour to talk about the gas tax holiday. I asked if there was another guest and the producer said, ‘We tried, but we couldn’t find anyone to argue the other side (that the gas tax holiday made sense).’ ”

Lee Schipper, an energy expert and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (via the New York Times): “Higher demand just pushes the world price a bit higher, giving a sizable share of the tax refund to oil producers.”

Tom Firey, managing editor of the libertarian Cato Institute’s magazine Regulation (via the Cato Institute’s blog): (T)he real credit should go to Sen. Barack Obama, who has dismissed the idea entirely as a ’short-term, quick-fix’ proposal. What Obama said last week about the very small monetary gain of McCain’s call for suspending the tax also covers Clinton’s nicely: ‘A half a tank of gas — that’s [their] big idea.’ ”

Gilbert Metcalf, a Tufts University economics professor and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (via Reuters): “I think it is a very bad idea… If we want people to invest in energy-saving cars, we need some assurance that the higher price paid for these cars is going to pay off through fuel savings… It is a very short-sighted, counterproductive proposal.”

Lawrence Goldstein, an economist at the Energy Policy Research Foundation (via the New York Times): “You don’t want to stimulate consumption… The signal you want to send is the opposite one. Politicians should say that conservation is where people’s mindset ought to be.”

Max Schulz, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment and a former senior policy advisor and speechwriting director for U.S. secretaries of energy Samuel Bodman and Spencer Abraham who helped roll out President Bush’s National Energy Policy in 2001 (via the Huffington Post): “I think it is close to political pandering… It is bad policy and political gimmickry. If you want to deliver relief to folks you have to do more than just this little holiday from the gas tax. You have to address what is driving the price of crude oil, even problems with the weak dollar. You aren’t going to win any points doing that, however. But you will get points if you get up and say let’s suspend the gas tax for a few months… I never have seen the wisdom of playing gimmicks games of the tax code.”

I don’t usually use comments on past posts as the seeds of new ones, but this one’s bugging me. This comment from “Jh” came in on the post I did yesterday listing Nancy Pelosi’s and others’ comments on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Indiana’s voter identification law:

“The right to vote is a foundation of our democracy. American citizens who wish to vote must be able to do so.”…Nancy…tell that to the people in the states where YOUR party decided not to count their votes in YOUR primary

No. No, no, no. This meme of “Oh, how awful — look at the nasty Democrats disenfranchising their own voters!” is just too superficial, and can’t be allowed to pass without some dissection.

If Michigan and Florida Democrats want to blame someone for their delegates not being seated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer, they need look no further than their own state capitols. National Democratic Party leaders warned both states repeatedly, for years, that bucking the party’s rules and setting primaries in January before some of the states the party chosen as bellwethers — first Iowa and New Hampshire, and now Nevada and South Carolina — meant their delegates would not be seated.

They were told plain and simple: If you break the rules, you will suffer the consequences. And they did it anyway.

In Florida, the Legislature passed a bill setting the early primary date with wide, bi-partisan margins; the same thing happened with Michigan’s bill in that state’s House, although the state Senate vote was split along party lines with the Republican majority prevailing.

And guess what? The Democratic National Committee did exactly what it warned it would do, refusing to seat the delegates.

If Michigan and Florida wanted to foment a national discussion on how the nation’s presidential primaries are run, they probably shouldn’t have mounted a kamikaze attack in an election year. A party sets rules for its own convention; you break ‘em, you lose. And if a party would buckle and not deliver the consequences it promised for a violation of the rules, every other state in the nation would look to move its own primary earlier and earlier to reap the economic benefit, political sway and media spotlight that comes with being among the earliest. It would be a free-for-all.

In fact, y’know who threatened U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. — a driving force behind Michigan’s move to an early primary — against doing exactly this in 2004? Why, it was then-DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, who detailed the heated encounter in his 2007 memoir. (There’s a slightly longer exerpt here.) Now McAuliffe is Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman — and wants Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates seated despite their transgression of the same party rules for which he fought so heatedly a few years ago.

So — without opining on the motivations behind and effects of Indiana’s voter-identification law, and the Supreme Court ruling that has affirmed it — I don’t see how that situation is akin to this. Florida and Michigan lawmakers of both parties played chicken with the DNC and lost, at their own voters’ expense. The blame lies with them, and with them alone.

With only a few precincts outstanding at this hour, the Associated Press shows Hillary Clinton with 55 percent of Pennyslvania’s Democratic vote — it was a closed primary, no independents allowed — and Barack Obama with 45 percent; that’s 80 pledged delegates for Clinton, 66 for Obama, 12 more yet to be awarded.

So, the new delegate totals seem to be:

CNN asks whether Clinton’s Pennsylvania victory came soon enough to save her candidacy: “Clinton told supporters in her victory speech that ‘the tide has turned.’ It’s more like she’s slowed the wave of momentum that appeared ready to carry Obama to the party’s nomination.”

The win certainly seemed to have given Clinton at least some degree of financial boost; Bloomberg reports her campaign claiming to have raised $2.5 million after the polls closed last night. In context, however, not much of that will be left after she pays her debts: Obama started the month with $42.5 million available while Clinton had about $8 million on hand but $10.3 million in unpaid bills.

Clinton’s campaign put out a bulletin today noting “more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate… Estimates vary slightly, but according to Real Clear Politics, Hillary has received 15,095,663 votes to Sen. Obama’s 14,973,720, a margin of more than 120,000 votes… This count includes certified vote totals in Florida and Michigan.” That would be the two states where Democratic candidates agreed not to campaign because they bucked the party’s rules by setting their primaries too early; Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. Even counting Florida but not Michigan, Obama’s still in the popular-vote lead.

So now it’s on to the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. Real Clear Politics’ averages of several polls shows Clinton with a slim lead in Indiana and Obama with a comfortable lead in North Carolina. Nationwide, it’s Obama by 10 percentage points. Watch for all those numbers to change somewhat as yesterday’s results sink in.

And Time magazine says “the real winner of the Democratic race in Pennsylvania is John McCain. The most significant number coming out of Tuesday night wasn’t Clinton’s 10 point margin of victory, but 43. That’s the percentage of Clinton voters who say they would stay home or vote for McCain if Obama is the party’s nominee in November.” But that doesn’t account for the more than a quarter of Republican voters in yesterday’s election who voted against McCain, picking Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee instead. True, there wasn’t a lot of impetus for McCain supporters to flock to the polls yesterday because he’s already the presumptive nominee; still, when 27 percent of those who did show up vote against the guy, you’ve gotta wonder how many of those people will vote against him or just stay home in November.

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, has blogged today that he endorses Barack Obama for president. This comes about a month after Bill Richardson, a fellow Clinton Administration cabinet member and longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, also went against them. Will James Carville call him a Judas too?

“Although Hillary Clinton has offered solid and sensible policy proposals, Obama’s strike me as even more so,” Reich writes, later adding Obama “offers the best hope of transcending the boundaries of class, race, and nationality that have divided us” and “offers the best possibility of restoring America’s moral authority in the world.”

Reich’s endorsement comes on the heels of his passionate defense of Obama in the hubbub following the candidate’s “bitter” remark at a fundraiser April 6 in San Francisco.

It’s not as if Obama is sweeping the old Clinton cabinet, however — former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former Secretary of Defense William Perry; and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo all have endorsed Hillary Clinton.

The blogosphere is abuzz with criticism of last night’s ABC Democratic debate, moderated by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Many are calling it a superficial poke-fest which failed to address substantive issues facing the American electorate.

And I suspect that’s not far from what Barack Obama was trying to communicate at that now-fateful April 6 fundraiser in San Francisco. There, he said working-class Americans are feeling “bitter” about the economic neglect they’ve experienced in the past few decades: “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Why? Because it’s those things on which politicians and campaign strategists harp in order to raise blood pressure, poll numbers and voter turnout, and on which the media — yes, I’ll say it: ESPECIALLY TELEVISION — harp in order to raise ratings.

Look at what the candidates were being asked last night: Wearing a U.S. flag pin? Gun control? To Obama, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Really? This is our national discourse? How about the issues that really affect the day-to-day lives of working-class people? Health care. Education. The housing crisis. Gas prices/energy policy/global warming. Trade policy’s effect on U.S. jobs.

Instead, we ask who loves America more — and by the way, did you know the Rev. Jeremiah Wright volunteered to serve six years first as a Marine and then as a Navy corpsman who provided medical care for President Lyndon Johnson, starting at a time when this nation still subjected him to the most pernicious racial discrimination?

It’s a disgrace, and if you read or listen to the entirety of what Obama said that day in San Francisco, this is exactly what he seemed to be trying to get at: Substantive discussion and action on issues of vital importance to American families has been replaced by shouting about hot-button matters which simply aren’t as important, if at all.

Political operatives, with the complacency and perhaps even conspiratorial cooperation of some media, bait the emotions of people frustrated by the constant struggle to get by, either to get them to the polls or to get them to keep watching. It’s a massive three-card monte, a giant con job.

Should people be bitter? Damn straight. Are they? You betcha. People who love this country should be angry as hell, as were most of American history’s greatest patriots. Injustice should breed contempt, matched by passion for rectification. CNN’s Lou Dobbs — himself too often a perpetrator of hot, empty rhetoric, particularly on immigration — seems to have been caught out by his own viewers in a poll run Tuesday on his Web site:

(H/T to Crooks and Liars for capturing the poll, no longer available on Dobbs’ site.)

Am I, an employee of a corporate-owned, oft-consolidated media outlet, being holier-than-thou? Maybe so; all across America, short-staffed, underpaid and overworked newsrooms too often go for the low-hanging fruit, but many of us still strive to convey useful information that’ll inspire thought, debate and action. And I don’t mean to imply all television journalists are evil; many, including many here in the Bay Area, try hard to bring out the stories that matter.

Yet on a national scale, too many of us fail too often, as do too many of the politicos on whom we report. That’s what I think Obama was talking about, and that’s what you saw last night on ABC.

Former San Francisco Mayor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown talked to the Bay Area Council’s 2008 Outlook Conference today, aboard the U.S.S. Hornet in Alameda, about the presidential race.

On Barack Obama’s controversial comments at an April 6 fundraiser in San Francisco, suggesting working-class people are bitter about their economic lot and “cling to guns and religion” as a result, Brown said this “frankly was probably an accurate comment.” But he said Obama should’ve realized a poor choice of words to express his sentiment, even if spoken before a small, no-press crowd in a private home in California, could be broadcast worldwide.

Brown said the race for the Democratic nomination is “still open season… At the moment, I don’t think you can pick a winner.” But “if you were a betting person, at this stage of the game, you’d have to be on Obama,” who is in the lead after coming from behind a presumptive frontrunner, and who offers a vibrant, future-oriented message.

Brown said he thought when the race began that if Hillary Clinton remained respectful of Obama and her other rivals for the nomination, she would win. “I did not beleive it made any sense to assume that instead of primary campaigns there would be coronations.” Obama, he said, has proved to be “a fabulous, qualified human being who also has lots of flavor about him;” his campaign proved to be savvy by not immediately gravitating to traditionally black forums and communities, but rather appealing from the start to as broad a demographic base as possible.

A ticket with both Clinton and Obama is “not possible at all,” Brown opined; their policies and approaches to politics are too different. “Obama is really part of a whole new thing that’s going on out there in the world of politics.”

More from Willie Brown, though not about the presidential race, after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, I wound up with far more detail then we could accommodate in Lisa Vorderbrueggen’s and my story about East Bay folks elected Sunday as delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Berkeley author Ayelet Waldman – who with her husband, author Michael Chabon, has been raising funds and writing praise for Obama – was elected as an Obama delegate from Rep. Barbara Lee’s 9th Congressional District.

“I’m thrilled beyond belief, I am happier than I ever thought – I didn’t realize how much I cared until push came to shove,” Waldman, 43, said Monday.

“This is the first time in either of our lives that we’ve been this excited, this committed, this interested quite frankly,” she said of herself and Chabon, adding that for them 2004’s election was all about defeating George Bush rather than about electing John Kerry. “The opportunity to vote for someone rather than against someone is a profound experience that neither of us has ever felt before.”

“My profoundest hope is that it’s going to be a fun-filled few days – that we’ll have it decided long before, that everyone will have thrown their support behind Barack,” she said, but it if the nomination comes down to a battle on the convention floor, “then I want to be there for that too.”

Read more, after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »