Month: October 2014

Most of Sean Haugh’s positions are pretty
much what you would expect from a Libertarian Party candidate.
Haugh, who’s running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, favors
legalizing marijuana and opposes any restrictions on abortion. He
says his top priority is to end “all war.” But nestled among the
unremarkable is one stance that’s, well, not like the others.
The Weekly Standard
reports:

Asked if he thought it was a mistake to reject additional
federal funding to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, Haugh replied,
“I do.”

“The rejection of the Medicaid expansion dollars—which on the
surface you could kind of make a libertarian case for—but the end
users have suffered.”

The notion that choosing not to expand a massive welfare program
is only “kind of” a libertarian thing to do is a bit of a head
scratcher. Federal grants to the states for Medicaid and the Child
Health Insurance Program totaled $265 billion in 2012. Under
Obamacare, states can get even more money in exchange for agreeing
to let a wider population, including non-disabled adults without
children, into the program.

A number of states, including North Carolina, have opted to
forgo the extra funds after the Supreme Court in 2012 issued a
decision that safeguards their ability to do so without facing
retribution from Washington.

Haugh’s position seems to be that lawmakers in Raleigh were
wrong for not voluntarily adding another 800,000-or-so people to
their Medicaid rolls. In a July 12
Facebook post, the Senate hopeful went even
further, implying that when states don’t expand the program,
“people die.” As evidence, he linked to a
news story about a North Carolina hospital that will soon be
shuttered:

Vidant Health System executives cited North Carolina’s decision
not to participate in federally funded Medicaid expansion as a
factor in the decision to close the hospital.

Haugh, who has worked in the hospital industry, talked about
this issue at more length in a
video for his campaign website. “As a libertarian, I
definitely want to reform and eventually eliminate federal
involvement in health care,” he says in the video. “But I’ll be
damned if I’m going to throw grandma out on the street to
accomplish that.”

In the Colorado Senate race, Democrat
Mark Udall, the incumbent, has arguably pursued the “War on Women”
strategy with more vigor than any other Democrat this year. He’s
run so many ads focused on the “women’s issues” of contraception
and abortion that he’s been dubbed “Mark
Uterus.”

The strategy doesn’t appear to be working very well. Although
Udall leads by six points amongst likely women voters, who support
him 45-39, Udall is down overall against his Republican opponent,
Cory Gardner, who leads with 46 percent of likely voters overall,
according to a Quinnipac poll released yesterday. With just 39
percent of likely voters saying they plan to support Udall, he’s

down by seven points. 

A new poll from the Associated Press helps explain why this
strategy, versions of which are being run by Democratic candidates
across the country, is falling flat: This year, most voters care
more about economic issues than social issues.
Via the AP:

Only 32 percent of likely voters called gay marriage an
important issue, compared with 91 percent ranking the economy
important, 78 percent with similar concerns about health care and
74 percent naming Ebola important. The issue that some Democrats
have emphasized most of all – abortion rights – also has been a
relatively low priority, with only 43 percent of likely voters in a
September poll ranking it important.

…One domestic issue that remains a priority for Americans is
health care. Only 3 in 10 say they support the overhaul passed in
2010, while nearly half (48 percent) oppose it.

Democrats are running on issues that many voters consider low
priority. But they may not have had much choice. As a Gallup poll
foundrecently, Democrats are winning on issues like contraception,
but Republicans are now
more trusted on higher priority issues like the economy and the
budget deficit. As Gallup concluded, “it has become pretty clear
that Republicans have a distinct and emerging issue advantage in
the 2014 campaign.”

Part of what’s fascinating is that this is happening despite how
thin the GOP agenda continues to be. Republicans have campaigned
heavily against Obama this year, but have been reluctant to offer
specifics about what they support. Democrats are running on the
wrong issues; Republicans are running on no issues. Yet voters seem
to prefer whatever it is the GOP stands for to what Democrats have
already done and still have to offer.

But what this also suggests is the increasing weakness of the
Democratic agenda as well. We have been hearing for years now that
the GOP is out of ideas, and there is an awful lot of truth to
that. But Democrats do not seem to have much of a grand to-do list
either. And what they do have does not seem to be particularly
motivating. As I’ve argued before, we’ve entered a post-policy
moment for both parties, in which both sides have exhausted
their agendas. Whatever comes next is going to be very
interesting. 

The City of South Miami wants to secede from
Florida. No, not by itself: In a
resolution passed earlier this month, the mayor and city
commission proposed that 24 counties leave the state together,
setting up a new state that they’d call South Florida and forcing
the rest of us to confront the thought of a world with two Floridas
in it.

Like many of the country’s secessionist movements, which pop up
periodically in regions ranging from eastern
Washington to
western Maryland, from northern
California to New
York City, the Miami revolt reflects a cultural divide. North
Florida is more southern than South Florida—yes, I know how weird
that sentence sounds—and that sometimes manifests itself in ways
more consequential than whether there are any good Cuban
restaurants in town. Right now, the resolution complains, “in order
to address the concerns of South Florida, it is necessary to travel
to Tallahassee in North Florida. Often South Florida issues do not
receive the support of Tallahassee. This is despite the fact that
South Florida generates more than 69% of the state’s revenue and
contains 67% of the state’s population.” Similar sentiments
inspired a pair of split-the-state resolutions a few years ago in
the towns of
North Lauderdale and Margate.

But there’s another factor this time: fear of climate change.
The built-up coastal communities on the southern tip of the state
are worried about rising sea levels, and they don’t think they’re
getting the support they need from the legislature. Here’s a
section from the South Miami resolution:

Whereas, climate change is a
scientific reality resulting in global warming and rising sea
level; and

Whereas, it is estimated that there will be a 3 to
6 foot sea level rise by the end of this century. In addition,
South Florida has very porous rock and, as the level of the sea
rises, the pressure will cause water to rise up through the ground
and flood the inland areas; and

Whereas, South Florida’s situation is very
precarious and in need of immediate attention. Many of the issues
facing South Florida are not political, but are now significant
safety issues…

We’re used to hearing global warming invoked to justify
centralization, not decentralization. Occasionally someone like
Elinor Ostrom will break with
that consensus, but that’s rare. The general assumption is that
the way to deal with climate change is to try to prevent it at
the source, and that the way to prevent it is to create a globally
binding agreement. World leaders haven’t
had much luck with that plan so far, and I doubt that’s going
to change anytime soon.

And so we’re hearing more about adaptation as
well as prevention. But adaptation is a decentralized process, not
a centralized one, with adjustments made by ports, private
companies, city and county governments, and other entities directly
affected by changing conditions. That doesn’t mean the feds are
left out—they’re getting hit up for subsidies and other sorts of
help—but the decisions are being made at relatively local levels,
and not always in the public sector. Those decisions don’t
always even require people to agree about what causes warming or
whether it’s happening at all. When my wife covers the effects of
rising sea levels on the Eastern Shore or the
islands of the Chesapeake Bay, the locals will often tell her
they think the streets are being flooded because of erosion or poor
drainage rather than climate change. But that doesn’t mean they
don’t want to do anything about it.

This is the other side of climate politics: a messy and largely
local trial-and-error process being carried out far from the
international summits that seize the headlines. That, plus the
occasional flare-up into something strange, like a secessionist
movement in the Miami suburbs. Save your Spanish doubloons, boys,
South Florida will rise again!