Rob Bluey's blog

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) confirmed this afternoon that Democrats will break their transparency pledge by bringing the stimulus bill to a vote tomorrow morning, giving lawmakers and the public significantly less time than the 48 hours promised.

The House is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and is expected to proceed directly to consideration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment conference report. The conference report text will be filed this evening, giving members enough time to review the conference report before voting on it tomorrow afternoon.

Hoyer's statement is disappointing if not surprising. For a party that made open government a rallying cry in 2006 and again in 2008, Democrats have effectively abandoned transparency for political expediency -- and resorted to cajoling K Street lobbyists.

Even supposed transparency advocate Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said today: "Don't know when we're going to vote. Will the no votes delay vote just because they can? Speed is important. They know that."

Assuming Hoyer's plan is carried out, he would give House members about 13 hours to read the 780-page bill. A congressional staffer did the math. That means lawmakers would be required to read one page per minute without sleeping or taking bathroom breaks.

Why the rush? Democrats know the longer the economic stimulus bill lingers, the more likely the public is to turn against it. Within the past week, Americans for Prosperity has seen a significant spike in people signing its anti-stimulus petition; the number stands at 435,000.

Equally disappointing, there's no indication that President Barack Obama will fulfill his promise for a five-day waiting period. Despite pressure from groups like the Sunlight Foundation, the White House could violate Obama's campaign pledge for the third time in less than a month.

Obama promised to "end the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors" in hopes of restoring trust in government. Despite overwhelming public approval and significant political capital, the president has made clear he's not yet ready to change the ways of Washington. This creates a tremendous opportunity for the minority.

President-elect Barack Obama has talked the talk about government transparency. But will he walk the walk? House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) stole the spotlight on the issue yesterday when congressional leaders sat down with Obama to discuss his economic stimulus package.

According to the New York Times, Cantor secured one of Obama's first specific policy commitments when the president-elect agreed to put "the entire contents of the legislation online in a user-friendly way to see how the money is being spent."

This was a brilliant suggestion from Cantor and a savvy political move. Conservatives must hold Obama and his administration accountable for his transparency promises. While I'm skeptical of Obama's sincerity (judging from his health care forums), the only way to keep him honest is to play offense.

Details of how Cantor's idea is accomplished will need to be figured out, but it's based on the concept that a full online ledger of the stimulus spending should be publicly available in a user-friendly format. The information should be updated in real-time, meaning that as the stimulus spending changes, the information online should reflect it immediately. Taxpayers should be able to sort by congressional district to find out how the money is being spent.

My only gripe with the idea is that it assumes a spending-focused stimulus is inevitable. Regardless, the onus will be on Obama and congressional Democrats to live up to their promise for complete transparency.

Americans are going to be busy these next two weeks. Christmas and New Year’s are traditionally a time to spend with family, do last-minute shopping and take a break from the strains of work -- and apparently fix America’s health care system.

That’s right, Tom Daschle wants you to talk about health care over the holidays. President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services has given the country two weeks, including Christmas Day, to provide input on how to improve health care in America.

Daschle doesn’t care if you meet at home, the office or a coffee shop -- just as long as he’s able to boast that the Obama administration listened to Americans. He probably figures it’ll be an easier sell when he proposes his Orwellian “Federal Health Board” to ensure unprecedented government interference in the delivery of care.

Transparency is so key because if we're going to do this right, it's going to mean we have to involve the American people. We have to involve people who have personal stories to tell, who have ideas to share, who have real experiences they can relate to. That is the essence of good legislating.

Daschle's "grassroots" reform discussion is a con -- and we need to expose it as such. Only organized interest groups such as AARP and Families USA will be listened to or even have a chance to be heard when the legislation is drafted. Can you picture Daschle dropping by Starbucks over the next two weeks to hear from real people? It’s ridiculous.

As conservatives, we need to figure out how we’re going to respond to attempts by the Obama administration to use the guise of public feedback to implement liberal policies. That could mean flooding Change.gov with comments from conservative activists or holding our own discussion forums to promote free-market ideas. We could embrace tools like Rebuild the Party’s feedback forum or shape public opinion through popular petitions like Drill Here, Drill Now.

Conservatives don’t have time to waste. On issues like health care and the economy, the Obama administration and liberals in Congress will move quickly next year before their honeymoon ends.

Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis wrote a lengthy article for Politico making the case that conservative ideas can still win, citing as evidence President-elect Barack Obama's embrace of many conservative themes during the campaign. Anuzis is absolutely correct, and that's exactly why we should hold Obama accountable for his promises.

Unfortunately, one of the "bold, conservative ideas" that Anuzis cites as an example is what's known as a tax holiday. In other words, he wants conservatives to embrace a tax version of Keynesianism that has little chance of accomplishing its goal of stimulating economic growth. Here is Anuzis' argument:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) has proposed taking the $350 billion pledged to the Wall Street bailout and instead funding a two month tax holiday for all Americans. That's two months of no income taxes, Social Security or Medicare taxes. That's thousands of dollars to pay mortgages, buy cars or invest in starting a new business that creates jobs. Newt Gingrich takes Rep. Gohmert's idea one step further, suggesting that instead of adopting Speaker Pelosi's dream of a $700 billion stimulus program, the tax holiday could be extended to a full six months. Now, that's what I call the mother of all stimulus packages!

There's one big problem with this stimulus package: It won't work. There's no good evidence that short-term jolts (such as tax holidays and tax rebates) spur economic growth. As my Heritage Foundation colleague Stuart Butler explains, putting dollars in people's hands doesn't mean they'll rush to the store, buy goods and create jobs. Bloggers got a chance to quiz Gohmert about it last week, and many appeared skeptical of the idea.

Don't get me wrong, Anuzis' intentions are correct. I'd rather keep the money than send it to Washington. But if the purpose is to stimulate the economy, this isn't the right approach. If Anuzis is going to advocate for policy solutions, he should embrace permanent tax rate reductions, repeal of the death tax and reduction of the corporate tax rate. (It's another question of whether the RNC chairman should stay out of policy and focus on politics.)

Conservatives are eager to offer new ideas, but we need to remember that not every new idea is a good idea.

“Which comes first,” asks Michael Turk, “ideas or the message?” That’s an easy one. Of course it’s ideas. But to understand why, let’s think about politics in the context of the production cycle.

This concept is not my original thinking. It was explained to me a couple weeks ago during a presentation on the future of conservatism as a way to grasp our shortcomings and understand the gaps of our movement.

Let’s start with the basic manufacturing production cycle, which I’ve boiled down to three essential steps: 1) obtain raw materials, 2) turn them into a product, and 3) sell that product to consumers.

Now let’s apply those three steps in the context of producing change in politics:

1. Coming up with ideas. Academia plays an important role, albeit less significant today due the shortage of right-leaning academics. For example, think about the work of the powerhouse team of political economists at the University of Chicago (Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, George Stigler) and how their ideas on free-market economics began to take shape after World War II.
2. Turning ideas into public policies. This is role of think tanks -- and on the right there is no shortage of them. Think tanks existed prior to the 1970s, but mostly in the form of academic institutions without students (AEI, Brookings, CSIS). The Heritage Foundation (my employer) helped usher in a new approach. These new institutions (Cato, ATR, NTU) began working directly with policymakers to have an impact.
3. Implementing policies. Here is where activist groups, media and politicians fit. The left has a superior network of implementers who are effective at shaping a coherent message (MoveOn.org) and using communications channels (full-time bloggers) to sell it. We're about to see how a politician, Barack Obama, achieves this through governing. On the right, groups like Club for Growth and online communities such as RedState fit into this portion of the cycle. Rebuild the Party is an example of an implementer.

The point of this exercise is to understand the imbalance we face on the right. There is a serious deficiency of academics and implementers. We have an abundance of think tanks. Because we lack balance, the production cycle is thrown out of whack and we’re unable to produce change.

You see, ideas alone don’t produce change. And activist groups and bloggers savvy at marketing can’t produce change if they don’t have principled public policies to back up their message. We need a more integrated structure and balanced production cycle.

Following the GOP convention last month, John McCain’s campaign had an extraordinary opportunity to capitalize on the excitement and good will that Sarah Palin brought to the ticket. Instead, they failed miserably.

Fortunately for the McCain campaign, last night’s debate performance offered a new opportunity. Palin’s uncomfortable interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric are old news. Her grasp of policy -- albeit jittery at times -- demonstrated that she has what it takes to be McCain’s No. 2.

What she does next -- or more importantly, what the McCain campaign allows her to do next --will define whether she has what it takes to define conservatism for the next generation.

It was about a month ago when I outlined Palin’s promise and peril. My opinion is largely unchanged. Conservatives should still be very skeptical given what little we know about her. The fact that we learned little about Palin’s worldview until last night is startling. And even then, it's hard to know if those were her thoughts or someone else's words.

Last month I posed these questions:

Will Palin follow in McCain's footsteps? Or will she charter her own course that remakes the right? She seems like a great leader. So where does she want to lead? Putting aside the talking points, what is her actual, governing philosophy? What are *her* priorities? Will she be a manager or transformative?

A month later, we still don’t have clear answers.

That’s why over the next month, the McCain campaign needs to let Palin be herself. Here are three things she can do:

1. Solo town hall meetings. This would erase doubts about Palin’s inability to answer tough questions. Putting her in front of an audience that can ask unpredictable questions would show that she’s comfortable talking directly to Americans and also eliminate the media filter. It ties in perfectly with McCain’s straight talk message.
2. More radio and TV interviews. As Conn Carroll notes, putting Palin before Gibson and Couric was like sending a baseball player to the majors without any practice. The campaign’s miscue can be corrected. From now until Nov. 4 she should be doing conservative talk radio daily (she’s only spoken to Hugh Hewitt so far) and sitting down with local radio or TV journalists in the cities she’s visiting.
3. Outreach to bloggers. At the lowest point in the McCain campaign, his team turned to bloggers for a biweekly call with the candidate. McCain was only one in either party to do this regularly. It built tremendous rapport and allowed bloggers to quiz McCain about timely issues. Doing this would also put Palin in contact with her staunchest supporters and bypass conservative media elites.

The American people didn’t get to know Sarah Palin over the course of the past month. With the clock ticking, there’s no time to waste.

Last week my Heritage Foundation colleague Todd Thurman noticed something unusual with web traffic on Heritage.org. Search engines, primarily Google, were sending far more people to the site than usual -- and almost all of it to a research paper from 2005.

The reason? Sarah Palin.

Prior to Aug. 29, the day John McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin was mentioned by name only a handful of times on Heritage.org. So why did our web traffic spike?

Back in October 2005, Heritage senior research fellow Ron Utt wrote a paper on the Bridge to Nowhere, which at the time focused on Sen. Tom Coburn’s attempt to transfer the $223 million for the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska, to a Hurricane Katrina-damaged bridge in Louisiana. It made no mention of Palin, who at the time, hadn't yet been elected.

Nearly three years later, Utt’s paper had become one of the most popular pages on the website -- all because of its excellent rank in the Google search results. If you don't think Google is shaping people's first impressions, think again.

Search-engine traffic began to increase the day Palin was picked, but the real spike happened Wednesday night when she mentioned the Bridge to Nowhere in her acceptance speech:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves

Inquiring minds clearly wanted to know what this Bridge to Nowhere was all about. The fact they were reading a paper written by the Heritage Foundation, as opposed to the New York Times, certainly bodes well for the right.

More than 95% of the people entering Heritage.org were new visitors. The average time spent on the Utt paper was more than 4 minutes, indicating people probably read most of it.

Palin’s popularity in online searches has been documented by Sarah Lai Stirland and Nate Silver. And fortunately, as the above example demonstrates, people are looking for information beyond the "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos."

Less than a week ago Sarah Palin was introduced to America and many conservatives for the first time. In the intervening week, the GOP vice presidential nominee has endured a liberal smear campaign, ruthless media criticism and the biggest speech of her life. She emerged unscathed and more respected. In the process she united the right.

What now for Sarah Palin? As Jon Henke wrote yesterday, there is a fundamental misunderstanding by liberals and journalists why people on the right are excited about her. But what is it that gives conservatives so much hope?

From a purely partisan perspective, Henke argues she will reform the "directionless, corrupt and ineffectual" party and change the identity of the GOP in the process.

The question, then, is what Sarah Palin will do with the Republican Party if she has the opportunity to remake it. Change is necessary, but where does the Republican Party go next? That is a question that needs to be addressed.

Henke's point is a good one -- and very likely the reason many Republicans are motivated. But the reason *conservatives* are excited about Palin extends beyond the party (yes, there is a difference). Like Ronald Reagan before her, Palin has a special talent for talking to grassroots conservatives in a way they can relate. Her can-do attitude and optimistic outlook are truly inspirational. After eight years and many disappointments, it feels like morning again in America.

There's an important distinction between her and Reagan, however. It took Reagan 16 years from his "Time for Choosing" speech in 1964 before winning his party's nomination. By the time he came to Washington, Reagan had a committed conservative movement with him and a portfolio of policy goals to choose from.

Sarah Palin is a blank slate. Aside from what we've learned in the past week, we know very little about the woman who could transform conservatism for the next generation. For that reason, we should be skeptical. Certainly not in a bad way, but with the recognition that she's on a ticket with maverick who has made a career of being unpredictable.

Will Palin follow in McCain's footsteps? Or will she charter her own course that remakes the right? She seems like a great leader. So where does she want to lead? Putting aside the talking points, what is her actual, governing philosophy? What are *her* priorities? Will she be a manager or transformative?

The next few weeks will be tremendously important for Palin. As we get to know her, she'll get to know us. What she says and what she does will be magnified because she is an unknown. The excitement she brings to the GOP ticket could be seen all week at the convention. No other Republican has been able to inspire that kind of enthusiasm in a long, long time. With so much at stake, she can't afford to let us down.

Want the latest news from the GOP's rules committee meeting in Minnesota? Your best bet is Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, who posted about 40 updates today on Twitter.

Embracing Twitter was a no-brainer for Anuzis. For years the Michigan GOP chairman has bypassed the mainstream media to communicate directly with people through a personal e-mail list that has swelled to 4,000. The list includes some of the most influential politicos and reporters in Michigan as well as national bloggers and conservative leaders.

What makes Anuzis' daily e-mail so effective is its authenticity. It's written each day by Anuzis in a conversational tone with the occasional typo. (You can read it on his blog or RedState.) The strategy isn't rocket science, but it's worked brilliantly for the Michigan GOP to communicate more effectively.

"We get more earned media off of Saul's e-mail commentary than we do in our traditional media relations efforts," says Bill Nowling, communications director for the state party. Nowling told me Anuzis' e-mails are simply more appealing to reporters and bloggers who cover politics -- even if Anuzis is saying the same thing the party would in a press release.

Several Michigan bloggers chat with Anuzis on Instant Messenger. If you send him an e-mail, you're likely to get an quick response. The chairman regularly responds to 200 to 300 per day.

Think Anuzis is a busy guy. No doubt about it. And we've just scratched the surface.

The team he's assembled in Lansing has been hard at work to make the state competitive for John McCain. Anuzis often says all is takes to win is money and everything else. If he's out raising the money, his staff back at party headquarters is doing everything else.

Nowling and Executive Director Jeff Timmer are key to building the infrastructure. Under their direction, the state party has rebuilt its website to provide more information to volunteers about their local party organization. More importantly, they've deployed an eLeader Program that allows volunteers to e-mail their friends and contacts. The party benefits by tracking the information in a database. After only a couple months, 225 activists are using it to raise money.

Michigan was the first state party to embrace the GOP Toolbar, which funnels a few pennies to the state GOP every time users type a Yahoo-based search in their browser. The toolbar was the work of former McCain adviser John Weaver. Nowling said it brings in about $1,000 per month to the Michigan Republican Party.

From a messaging standpoint, the state GOP is experimenting with Facebook to reach supporters. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Ann Arbor to sell her new book prompted Anuzis to quickly organize a protest that drew about 50 people on a rainy night. Anuzis created an event on Facebook just 24 hours earlier and e-mailed his 1,500 friends.

Nowling acknowledged that Anuzis catches flak from detractors and even other GOP leaders, but he shows no sign of slowing down. Anuzis recently spoke to the National Conference of State Legislators in New Orleans about staying ahead of the curve. He regularly prods his fellow Republicans to do so as well.

"We're successful because Saul is invested," Nowling said. "When technology advanced so he could do this kind of political activity online, he just rode the wave."

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) was instrumental on Aug. 1 from the start of the #dontgo revolt on the House floor. But since then, he hasn't been back to Washington, opting instead to focus on work in his district. He's also doing two things that almost certainly enhance his profile as a potential VP for John McCain: raising money for Republicans and appearing on TV as a surrogate for the GOP nominee.

Nonetheless, Cantor's name has been left out of recent news stories or relegated to darkhorse status. Aside from an excellent Washington Times piece by Ben Domenech making the case for Cantor, it would appear his 15 minutes of fame have faded after a flurry of news stories several weeks ago.

That could change over the next week as he heads to Denver for the GOP's messaging operation to counter the Democratic National Convention. Just as they did four years ago in Boston, Republicans will bring some of the party's most recognizable faces and rising stars for news briefings each day.

Cantor's absence from Washington didn't strike me as unusual until today when I heard Minority Leader John Boehner was headed back to Capitol Hill for the Republican revolt, which enters its 14th day tomorrow. It'll mark the second time Boehner has come back. Other members of the Republican leadership team -- Whip Roy Blunt, Conference Chairman Adam Putnam, Policy Chairman Thaddeus McCotter and NRCC Chairman Tom Cole -- have also returned.

From what I was able to gather, it's not that Cantor doesn't want to come back. He simply doesn't have the time given his jam-packed schedule and stumping for McCain. "Eric's not the kind of guy who lets the grass grow under his feet," a source told me today.

There's no question about that. Cantor has collected more than 34,000 signatures on his Call Congress Back petition, which launched simultaneously with the #dontgo protest on the floor. He has consistently kept pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi in TV interviews. And he was the McCain campaign's official representative on Aug. 4 conference call about Barack Obama's energy plan.

Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps. But that's what makes VP speculation so fun.