The Progressive States Network's focus this week is on universal voter registration.  This is an idea whose time is long overdue.  The kind of attention and pitched battles we fight over voter registration is nothing short of ridiculous, if you stop to think about it.  Basically, the purpose of voter registration is to allow the state to build a database of eligible voters, and to locate those voters in cities and precincts.  This is fundamentally a technical challenge, and really, not a very difficult one.  The fact that voter registration is a difficult and mammoth task is, in the age of sophisticated data matching algorithms and large scale database systems, a national embarrassment.

PSN, whose focus is on state policy reforms, rightly suggests a number of incremental steps towards making voter registration easier and more widespread.  These steps include aggressively mining databases to track citizens as they move about the state, making voter registration available at more places besides the DMV, etc.

That is a good start, but it seems to me that Congress could one-up the states, without too much effort.  Simply by matching records from the social security database with the list of tax returns each election year, the federal government could produce a "pretty good" list of all 18-year-old citizens, and the addresses for each of those people.  There would be some rate of error - as in the case of young adults who live in one place when they file their taxes in April, and have moved by the time elections come around in November - but I think it would be a reasonably good approximation.  Why not make that list the default voter roll, and then allow citizens who moved, or who didn't file taxes for some reason, to add themselves to the rolls after the fact?  To make things a little smoother, citizens could be given a web-based and phone-based interface to the database, to allow them to check their own registration status, indicate an address change, or perhaps even to find their polling place or request an absentee ballot by mail.

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Amidst the current economic downturn, states legislatures across the country are faced with some of the tightest budget crunches in recent memory.  According to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities,There are currently 20 states facing a combined budget shortfall of $35 billion in 2009, with 8 more projected to enter the red in 2010.  With over half the country's states facing immanent deficits and the rest struggling to stay in the black, the temptation in most statehouses has been to "tighten up the belt," slashing spending on crucial social services and trimming back the public workforce wherever possible.

This slapdash strategy is  a recipe for disaster.  At a time when private spending is already plummeting, laying off state workers and cutting off help to those in need is the last thing our ailing economy needs.  A far more humane and farsighted solution would be to seize the current economic challenges as an opportunity to create a fairer tax system; one  that would increase state revenues, extend help to those most in need, and ask corporations and the wealthy to do their fair share to help the country through tough times.

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Last night I went to a fundraiser for the Progressive States Network at the Mott House in DC, which is right near Capitol Hill.  I saw Al Franken, Keith Ellison, Jon Tester, and Bernie Sanders.  I also chatted with Nancy Keenan, head of NARAL.  

I'm really impressed with Keith Ellison.  He got his start in politics in political activism against Apartheid, and I chatted with him for about fifteen minutes.  Ellison is part of a new group of politicians coming into the political process that, and I don't really know how to say this any other way, sound like normal people.  Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, and John Kerry are charismatic people, as are the whole crew of political consultants that accompany them, like James Carville.  But there is also a showmanship, an excessive sincerity, and a disdain for vision.  

I never wrote about the blogger lunch with Bill Clinton because it was off the record.  And frankly, it wasn't that interesting.  But I have two observations.  Clinton is a wonderful storyteller and has a terrific memory, and he uses both of these talents as weapons.  When he wanted to evade a question, he either overloaded the questioner with facts, or told a wonderful story.    There was a sense that Clinton looked at me and those around the table as objects with levers that he could and did pull.  Along with George Bush, Clinton is the preeminent politician of his generation.  The traits these two exhibit are the traits that our political selects for, or at least has selected for.

Keith Ellison, John Hall, and Darcy Burner, to name three politicians I've had some contact with, don't exhibit these traits.  Their sense of humor is more like the Simpsons, their style is ideological, and they aren't colored by their memories of Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, or Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the Progressive States Network because it's a really impressive organization.  The group was able to help legislators introduce Iraq resolutions in 29 states, which allowed full public and press debates over the issue.  This has been absolutely essential to getting the legislation in Congress passed.  Policy, and in particular policy at a state level, is where the rubber hits the road in terms of movement building.  I once spent some time in New Hampshire and met with a New Hampshire representative who handed me a copy of ALEC's handbook.  ALEC is a right-wing organization that has helped craft legislation and avoid legal challenges for state legislators for the past twenty five years.  The legislator pressed the booklet into my hands with the fervor of a missionary, and he clearly relished the opportunity to win another convert.  This happens, all over the country in state houses, and it's just a structural advantage the right has had.

With the Progressive States Network, ALEC has not just a counterpart but a superior counterpart.  Much of what ALEC does is communications and information-sharing, but it was designed around fax machines and conferences.  Since the left is ahead online, the Progressive States Network should be able to leapfrog ALEC in a few years because they can just plug into our web-based infrastructure.

This is sort of a wandering post, but I have a few more observations.  It was a very male-heavy event in terms of speakers, which is disturbing in terms of the overall movement.  And it was obvious from my discussion with Nancy Keenan that she has no idea why people are criticizing her organization, NARAL (she could start here).  I suspect these are related problems, but not insurmountable.  I mean Speaker Pelosi is probably the closest person we have to a leader.

So there we go.  

Update [2007-4-20 14:20:39 by Matt Stoller]:: Joel Barkin emails me to let me know that some of the female speakers had to back out, and that the male speakers have great records on women's issues. I didn't mean to accuse PSN of anything, it was more an observation that politics is often dominated by men. This is a general cultural problem - witness Imus and cries of racism versus a relatively less volumeous discussion of misogyny. PSN is actually better in this regard; the crowd was gender split about even, and multi-racial. I discussed this with Keenan, as it strikes me that one of NARAL's great failures is to not create structures to support women in politics. She didn't agree with me that NARAL had any role in the problem.

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Another week, another high-profile success story from the new infrastructure of the progressive movement. This time, it wasn't the Anti-Iraq Escalation Campaign but trade, and the frontlines were right here in Montana - the state whose senior senator is Sen. Max Baucus (D), the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees all international trade policy. Baucus has recently come around on the war, and I have congratulated him for his conversion. However, on issues important to K Street like trade, he still seems to be doing a kabuki dance - saying some of the right things, but subtly letting D.C. know that he's still considering doing Big Money's bidding at the end of the day. Specifically, Baucus used the first day of his committee chairmanship to pen an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring that he supports President Bush's request to reauthorize "fast track" trade negotiating authority - the authority that allows presidents to strip all labor, human rights and environmental protections out of trade deals, and prevents Congress from doing anything about it.

Enter State Sen. Jim Elliott (D-Trout Creek), chairman of the Montana Taxation Committee - our little state's equivalent of the Finance Committee. Working closely with national groups like the Progressive States Network and Citizens Trade Campaign and with local groups like the Northern Plains Resource Council and organized labor, Elliott powered a forceful resolution through the Montana Senate demanding Baucus use his power to outright reject Bush's fast track request. The measure passed the closely divided Senate 45 to 5 - a resounding bipartisan statement.

The result, as you will see in the extended entry, has been a bit of a media flurry.

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All successful movements understand the use of both the carrot and the stick. Today, the Progressive States Network, the Citizens Trade Campaign, and local labor/environmental/agriculture groups show what an effective stick looks like here in Montana, as they helped the Montana State Senate overwhelmingly pass a resolution demanding Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) use his chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee to reject President Bush's request for "fast track" trade authority. The full press release from the Progressive States Network is at the end of this post.

Make no mistake about it: the Senate resolution, authored by fair trade champion Sen. Jim Elliott (D-Trout Creek), is no small accomplishment: Baucus, by virtue of his chairmanship, is the single most powerful lawmaker in Congress when it comes to "free" trade, and "fast track" is the single most important "free" trade policy because it gives presidents the ability to ram lobbyist-written pacts through Congress without any labor, human rights or environmental standards. Additionally, Baucus used the very first day of his chairmanship to author an op-ed on the Wall Street Journal's right-wing editorial page demanding Congress support Bush's request for "fast track" reauthorization - a move that made K Street lobbyists cheer, but should make the rest of us retch.

Again, the full press release is in the extended entry. It will be interesting to see Baucus's reaction. In just the last week his language on trade seems to have changed - but whether that rhetorical shift means a policy shift is anyone's guess. This is, after all, the guy who traveled to India to give a speech trumpeting job outsourcing.

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