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So How Many Divisions Do The Clerics Have?

By Steve Hynd

There's been a lot written in the West about the Iranian election protests, mostly by those who have a vested career or ideological interest in seeing the whole semi-democratic theocracy instituted by the 1979 revolution fall. Cynically, for many American pundits it all comes down to vicarious vengeance for those long-ago hostages but they've prettied it up in talk of democracy on the march and freedom agendas. It's a ridiculous fairy tale and even those pushing it know that to be the case.

The other version of the narrative is one of an internal power struggle between competing factions of Iran's elite. The Rafsanjani faction vs the Ahmadinejad faction, with the latter the actual outsiders and Mousavi's street-protesting supporters just bit players and the real prize the ability of one elite group or another to line its own pockets with Iran's oil wealth.

In that respect, the news that the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom, part of the Rafsanjani elite faction, has spoken out against Ahmadinejad's ballot-stuffing exageration of his electoral win is significant. But far more significant is the news that the Revolutionary Guard have confirmed their place beside Ahmadinejad in his coup to remove the "republic" from the Islamic Republic.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite military branch, said the guard's takeover of the nation's security had led to "a revival of the revolution."

..."Because the Revolutionary Guard was assigned the task of controlling the situation, [it] took the initiative to quell a spiraling unrest. This event pushed us into a new phase of the revolution and political struggles and we have to understand all its dimensions."

...Jafari's comments came the closest yet to publicly acknowledging what government supporters describe as a heroic intervention by the Revolutionary Guard and critics decry as a palace "coup d'etat" instigated by military elites loyal to Khamenei.

..."Today, no one is impartial," Gen. Yadollah Javani said at the Sunday news conference, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. "There are two currents -- those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it."

Government as a counterweight

By Fester:

Felix Salmon has been advocating a need for a stronger regulatory regime on banking fees. His argument is simple, there is a massive imbalance of power and systemic cognitive biases that are being exploited for a wealth extraction opportunity by the banks.

Note that the normative modal verbs here: I wrote that the banks “should be stopped”. In response, Fernando says that “we need to keep holding people responsible” and that “some people just need to manage themselves better”. But here’s the difference: stopping banks is, conceptually, possible. But the $38 billion in annual overdraft fees are clear proof that Fernando’s “people” just aren’t going to magically start managing their finances in an optimal manner.

Empirically speaking, it’s clear that the 20% of checking account holders who pay, on average, $1,374 in annual overdraft fees apiece are precisely the people least able to afford them. They’re probably also the 20% of people who, for whatever reason, find it very difficult to manage their personal finances. Not everybody is as numerate and sophisticated as Vincent Fernando — a lot of people can’t even manage simple addition and subtraction. Is it fair for the highly-sophisticated and numerate executives at international banking giants like Bank of America to take advantage of that financial illiteracy in order to line their own pockets with multi-million-dollar paychecks? Or should people be able to trust their banks implicitly?

I agree with Felix, the incentive structure and the capacity endowments are not aligned for bank consumers to be able to effectively defend their interests in the face of disproportional expertise that is brought to bear against them. It is this power imbalance in that consumers who are vulnerable are diffuse, under pressure and seldom act as acturially units instead of granular units with their own biases and social pressures that fuels quite a bit of my politics. The banks in this case have a massive informational edge as well as the credible club of beating down a credit rating to effectively impose their will on consumers. And competition has not helped the low end consumer in that banks are not competing to keep fees down or to give a twenty four hour free grace period after a notification e-mail or phone call is received. Competition instead has seen the low-end consumer as a profit center that can be used to build assets and cash flow for the more competetive upper-end market.

Countervailing power and influence is needed to create a reasonably close to level playing field. Some leveling of that field will result in decreased access to credit for the most marginal borrowers and bankers; however a good deal of the leveling will result in the poor subsidizing the middle and upper classes less as they pay lower fees.

The tax revolt of 2010 (cont...)

By Fester:

People are in pain right now. Twenty million homeowners are underwater, a systemic debt reduction effort is underway, the employment picture now just sucks instead of horrendously sucking, any productivity and compensation gains are getting eated up by health care premiums and energy prices have bounced back up after an easy first half of the year.

In November 2007, I thought one of the dynamics that we would be seeing in 2009 and 2010 would be a property tax revolt. Property owners in bubblicious areas would see their homes go underwater as values and the regional economy that was built on bubble building deflated, and these property owners would be in pain and in a political position to do something about some of their pain:

People who are stuck with mortgages and houses that they can not sell, refinance or service will be looking for help. They will be looking for refinancing deals, special breaks, holds on foreclosures, delays on credit reporting, and most significantly at the local level, assistance on minimizing the quasi-fixed costs. That means support for more heating and energy assistance, lobbying for lower insurance limits for flooding and hurricanes in disaster prone areas with the hope of either dodging the bullets, or shifting those costs to someone, somewhere else, and most importantly, constant and downwardly revising re-assessments without concurrent increases in millage rates...

Homes are the primary asset for most people, and right now homes are under systemic threat as a symptom of a greater problem. People want to make that pain go away without the costs of fixing the greater problems, and engaging in a local government financial death spiral and micro-local education arbitage seems like a decent short term fix, so we'll see a full scale tax revolt in 2010 or no later than 2012 as the last round of housing bubble junk Option ARM mortgage resets will be hitting in 2010/2011 --- what we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg

We have seen refinancing deals, special breaks, and holds on foreclosures as federal policy. These efforts have probably brought marginal relief but they have not addressed the systemic problem of way too much debt and not enough carrying capacity. Local governments are just starting to get slammed as the combination of a decent first half of FY 2009 on revenue collection and short term reserves have made the FY-09 budgets austere but not dramatically shrunked. Those reserves are no longer in place for most states as they face massive budget deficits. Balancing those state budgets will often mean school and local jurisdictions that rely on state funds will see a significant hole in their budget that can either be filled by new taxes or spending cuts.

Local taxing authorities will want to maintain assessed values from the bubble peak years and fight like hell against appeals for lower, closer to market values. Politically it is easier to have a low millage rate on an artificially high base than to have a high millage rate on an accurate base. The New York Times reports on this fight:

Homeowners across the country are challenging their property tax bills in droves as the value of their homes drop, threatening local governments with another big drain on their budgets....

The pain at the state level is trickling down to county and local governments. To compensate, about 10 percent of large counties are raising the tax rates associated with home values to minimize the revenue loss, the county association said....

The revenue losses are coming as homeowners prod towns for new assessments, and as municipalities conduct regular revaluations of their real estate. While declining residential values weigh heaviest on many governments, the value of commercial real estate is also sliding as businesses shut down and move out of storefronts or shopping malls....

Mr. Kramer, the assessor in Contra Costa County, said homeowners started swamping his office with requests for new assessments in December. As many as 500 people would call in one day. His voice mail message now begins: “If you’re calling to request an informal review of your property value due to the declining real estate market.”

Contra Costa has now reduced the recorded value of more than a third of the 350,000 privately owned properties in the county....

I still think that there is a significant political opening for demagogues who call for tax cuts uber alles as that will seem to alleviate some of the pain for a little while and when people are getting beaten down, a breather and a break is a very attractive promise.

The Fourth of July

By Ron Beasley

It's the 4th of July, the birthday of this Republic.  It is a good day to think about how it all started.  That history has been re-written many times over the last 233 years so this might be a good day to make a resolution to become more informed.  A good place to start is  A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic by John Ferling.  You can find my review here. The writings of Thomas Paine are another must read.  You can find an online copy of Paine's Common Sense here or if you prefer a book The Essential Thomas Paine is a good one.  And you might want to take another look at the Adamses.  They are described as Americas first political dynasty.  The have been compared to today's Bush dynasty but even though both John and his son John Quincy are thought to have had failed presidencies it is horribly unfair to compare them to the Bush family.  Without John Adams there would not be a United States of America.  A good source of information on the Adams family is America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.

Where's My Monkey Wrench?

By Steve Hynd

A couple of days ago,  Chris Bowers snarkily announced his conversion to being a "conservative Democrat".

After several years of trying to "retake" the Democratic Party and make it more progressive, today I am giving up and becoming a conservative Democrat. Upon careful consideration, the benefits packages are simply too heavily tilted toward the corporate wing of the party. Check it out:

It would be pretty sweet to be able to endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes to keep me in the Party. I mean, if you do this as a progressive, then you are pretty much screwed for life.

...If you are a conservative Democrat, you get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own. If you are a progressive, you have to stand at the back of the line, and then get threats about never hearing from the White House again if you step out of line.

Further, if you are a conservative Democrat, you can also refuse to pay your Democratic Party Committee dues, and still receive disproportionate expenditures from Democratic Party Committees. That is just a straight up good deal.

...Being a conservative Democrat gets you more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors. Hard to argue with receiving both enormous big dollar fundraisers held in your honor and huge amounts of money from small progressive donors. So really, who cares if bloggers complain about you. Their readers are still going to fork over huge amounts of money.

If you are a conservative Democrat, you get to hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want. And there are no repercussions. In fact...

Being a conservative Democrat also makes you far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama's cabinet by 7-1.

Finally, if one of those crazy progressives decides to challenge you in a primary campaign, if you are a conservative Democrat you can also count on the endorsements of 95% of your congressional colleagues, the entire party leadership, and virtually every progressive advocacy organization. They will stand by you.

"Bonesparkle" at Scholars & Rogues took up the issue (H/t Kat):

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence...

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

...Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

It's not a new idea. The same ideas play out in the run-up and aftermath to every major election cycle as progressives - perpetual victims - steel themselves to vote for people they're sure are going to screw them, get screwed, then wonder how to stop being screwed. Indeed, back in 2005 I contributed some ideas to the discussion a whole bunch of bloggers were having for a "coalition of the left", an American Solidarity movement which would be a progressive "big tent" outwith the self-imposed political rapings of the Democratic Party. The best round-up of the discussion came from American Samizdat.

Then, as now, the biggest real-world barrier to a divorce of progressives and Beltway Democrats is the way in which the big two parties have the electoral process sewn up at the earliest stages, making it nigh-on impossible for a new third party to get on the ballot in enough places to mount a truly national campaign. The biggest emotional barrier is the perennial notion that "this time it will be different" - the Dems playing Lucy with the football, as Fester likes to describe it. For the 2006 cycle, the football was Iraq. For 2008, it was Barack Obama himself and his promises even convinced cynical me to back off from urging that divorce. But Obama has become more and more a Tony Blair figure - he said a lot of stuff to get elected but on healthcare, the economy, social safety nets, interventionist foreign policy, state secrecy, torture and the Imperial presidency he's turned out not to mean a whole lot of those words.

No more excuses. "Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet."

Solidarinosc!

Time for a Blogger's Ethics Panel

By Fester:

Time for a blogger ethics panel as there is no invinsible wall between editorial and business functions at this and many other blogs. The Newshoggers recently received a paid advertisment from the ACLU that advocates Twittering Against Torture. Once BlogAds takes their cut, we may be able to afford a pint of good Kentucky whiskey to split amongst everyone. The ACLU advertised on the 'Hog because they consider the writers and by implications our audience to be a receptive audience to their message that torture is an inherent bad and should not be condoned. Our opinions as writers made us notable and potentially valuable to an advertiser. Time for an ethics panel...

If this Politico Report is to believed, the Washington Post really needs a Bloggers' Ethics Panel:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors....

 

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

 

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

 

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion....

 

Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ..

Of course we know it is the job of the national print media to star-fuck.  Why would that raise any ethical concerns at all.  And why would this raise any credibility concerns when it is so difficult to get decent steaks with an appetizer, desert and a pair of drinks for two for less than $20,000, they barely are making any money on this at all.  There is nothing suspicious here.  Nothing at all besides the complete confirmation of the malleability of the Washington Post’s editorial stances for deep pockets. 

But there is no need for an ethics panel as Tom in Comments at Balloon Juice wins quote of the week on this story with this line:

So we have now come to the point where a health care lobbyist is more ethical than the Washington Post.

Wow!

Congress has few philospher kings

By Fester:

I like to live in the real world. It is messy, it is confusing, it often produces non-optimal outcomes (depending on the relevant constraints) but it is tangible. I can also live in a normative world where everything is neat, clean, organized and optimized towards the relevant constraints. However that world seldom exists. I often look for satisficing improvements instead of optimal solutions because the improvements are achievable.

I don't understand the critique of Waxman-Markley that Andrew Samwick and others are advancing in that it is a satisficaing improvement but non-optimal on several grounds:

Much as you may like the idea, this is another 1300 pages of complexity and loopholes. Buried in there, I'll wager, are more than enough ways for large organizations (the ones who hire lobbyists) to get all the exemption and evasion they'll need. Consider the alternative of a carbon tax calibrated to achieve the same emission reductions, and applied to all sectors including vehicle fuel consumption. I'm no expert on translating ideas into pages of a bill, but that can't be much. And given that it allows us to do away with the CAFE standards, I figure we've done a great service of dramatically simplifying the whole regulatory process for carbon emissions.

Economically, a clean carbon tax and a clean cap and trade bill will do the same thing. They will both internalize the currently externalize cost of carbon dioxide emissions. There are two big differences. The first is that a a carbon tax is a price certain option while the cap and trade system is a quantity certain feature.  Secondly, cap and trade is economically more efficient as it allows for market discovery of prices of a scarce good instead of hoping that Congress can hit the right number at any given time for optimal economic efficiency for a given amount of emissions.  

 

His argument is that a carbon tax would be neater and less messy.  Lobbyists would not be able to claw out special interest exemptions and transfers and the legislation would be only several pages long.  He is arguing a straw man here in my opinion.  A properly designed cap and trade system could also be written in a fairly short and concise manner as well.

 

He is bitching and moaning about basic political incentives here.  A complex bill with exemptions, curlicues and who knows what else in it for concentrated interests is far more profitable to the relevant players than a simple, clean sheet proposal with no exemptions.  Dr. Samwick is implicitly arguing that a carbon tax would be less susceptible to this type of manipulation than a cap and trade regime.  I have severe doubts about that.  We have plenty of evidence that tax bills, even comparatively simple tax bills that are mere modifications of existing tax laws can and will be massively abused with exemptions, exceptions, partially refundable credits, donut hole deductions and anything else that concentrated interests can muster to improve their interests against the counterfactual of a clean bill.  The classic example is the agricultural bill where there are significant subsidies for sugar, mohair, honey and other products because there is a strong lobby for those interests while the public purpose of food security, public health and reasonably low prices for a wide selection of goods is often ignored. 

 

I have yet to see a good political reason why the concessions that the Democrats on the Agricultural Committee wanted and received to weaken the bill and make the bill more complex for cap and trade would not also be granted in a carbon tax system.  I think it is very reasonable to assume that Agricultural Committee Democrats would want land use carbon emissions to be exempted from the carbon tax or at least counted under a friendly system.  Those are the concessions that they basically got in cap and trade, and those would be the concessions they would have wanted from a carbon tax regime.  Otherwise they most likely and there would be nothing. 

 

Now if Dr. Samwick wants to argue that doing nothing now is a superior option as the costs of action and inaction escalate the pressure to pass a much cleaner bill that is more to his liking at some uncertain point in the future, that is a defensible argument.  However that is not the argument he is making.  He is whining that Congress is acting like politicians engaged in politics with attendant incentives instead of philosopher king technocrats who will agree with his preferred solutions.  Me, I’m happy for an improvement with the hope that institutional inertia will lead to a good process and outcome over time. 

 

 

Flip flops, flexibility and pressure politics

By Fester:

I don't think the political world is made up of people who have single minded and immovable convictions on most or all moderately to highly salient political issues of the day. In fact, I am quite glad that the world is made up of people who are willing to engage in trade-offs and concentrate on a few issues that really are important to them or their constituents. Otherwise almost nothing could be achieved as everything would be the highest priority and thus nothing would be a priority. A world in which people are willing to engage in trade-offs allows for both priorities to be ordered and compensation for losers to be arranged on a Pareto basis if possible.

This visualization of politics and thus politicians as having a few core convictions (one of which is often re-election) and then a much broader array of preferred but malleable preferences is key to pressure and incentive based activism. The idea behind pressure activism is to be able to threaten or aid a politician on one of the few highly salient core convictions (including re-election) in order to get an activist preferred policy outcome on one of the malleable preferences. That is why the unions dangle their mobilization and funding support contigent on EFCA committments, that is why Wall Street donates money contigent on votes for banking regulation, that is why NARAL and NOW endorse candidates that support NARAL and NOW's core missions. It is basic politics. And it is interesting and fascinating as hell.

So when Chris Bowers laments the fact that Arlen Specter is responding to political incentives by reversing his position on the public plan, I am confused:

Specter's flip-flop simply must be the result of the increasing pressure he is feeling from Sestak. As such, progressive activists should be happy that our strategy of pressuring Democrats through primaries is validated, right? After all, this is a pretty clear example of a success for that strategy.

However, I'm finding myself depressed by this success. I got the "make them do it" blues, and here is why

The concept of making Democrats vote for more progressive legislation through primary challenges is predicted on the notion that we are dealing with people who are fundamentally self-centered, power hungry, and morally flexible....

When we actually succeed in flipping votes on important issues through primary challenges, we should pat ourselves on the back for developing a successful political strategy. However, it is also very depressing because it verifies that the members of Congress who flipped their votes are, as I said above, self-centered, power hungry, and morally flexible....

Shocking, politicians respond to incentives.... stop the presses.

Everyone responds to incentives.

If I was not getting paid a decent salary with decent benefits, I would not be showing up at my job every morning and giving my employers an honest day of labor. Is that fundamentally immoral in that I am doing something that others want only because I like the incentive that is offered to me in the form of a paycheck? I don't think so. My unconstrained time preference would be to spend a lot of time with my daughter as she is learning how to 'dance' on her dad's lap, spend a lot of time with my wife, and writing but I and everyone else operate in a world of constraints which includes the need to eat and keep a roof over my family's head.

I want to work politically towards a world where there is a working majority of representatives who have a varied array of immaleable convictions that are close to my political preferences. More importantly, I want a political landscape so that the default political analytical assumption on malleable issues is that the political incentive structure is weighed towards my political preference zone. At that point, activism and pressure is neither futile nor a rear guard action. But I definately do not want representatives who has not changed their mind or can not make a trade-off between competing priorities as we might as well just have an automon at that point.

Lucy's Football

By Fester:

Ian Welsh has the outline of the Senate Finance Committee’s health insurance plan. The shorter version of the short version is that it sucks. Here is the short version of the plan:

1) Lower the medicaid coverage rate from 150% to 100% of the Federal poverty line, 133% for kids and pregnant women (once you have the baby, too bad for you)

2) Subsidies stop at 300% of the poverty line (was 400%)

3) No Public Option mentioned

4) Insurance exchanges at the State level

5) Must buy insurance unless it costs more than 15% of your income

6) A fine if you don’t buy insurance unless you’re below the Federal poverty line

For the most part, as Walker discusses, this is actually identical to or slightly worse than the plan put forward by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Yes, worse than the insurance industry’s plan. Remarkable. Baucus is really earning his campaign donations these days…. Without a public option, the insurance companies will have no check on their prices, let alone pressure to actually reduce them. Because people will be forced to buy bad insurance, they’ll hate the plan, and because “reform” has been passed, we’ll have to wait another 10 or 12 years for another shot....

Tim at Balloon Juice is very curious why Obama is not actively selling a strong public option proposal.

Watching Democrats try to fix health care I see a photo negative of the Bush years. Here is an issue with obvious urgency. Setting aside our shameful infant mortality rate, uninsured rate and other statistics, medical bills are by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Insurer misconducy wrecks lives every day in every city in America. The right options are obvious and relatively few in number. Huge majorities support doing the right thing.

Even self-interest is similarly one sided. Remember how much Republicans invested in realigning the destroying Social Security? Imagine if they had an issue that would realign the country in their favor and instead of huge majorities violently hating it, most Americans strongly supported what they wanted to do. Republican strategists would give two of their first three kids for a shot at an issue with this much going for it....

I hear that Obama supports the public option. That would mean more if it felt even a little more urgent than his idea that we should have a college football playoff series.

Belaboring the obvious, people who care about what they’re doing normally enter negotiations with some firm goal in mind. Most would agree that it is moronic to make negotiating itself the point.

Many others, including Steve have noted that if a major and effective health financing reform bill passed with either a pathway to de facto single payer for baseline care or at least a strong public option, major fundraising avenues will be closed off to some of the current veto points in the Senate and the House. I think that is part of the problem with the Democrats.

However, I would like to get a little more cynical for a moment. What if healthcare reform is to Democrats what abortion and anti-feminism is to Republicans in that both are seem by significant portions of their respective bases as high salience issues that are best served by never fully addressing? Gotta keep the activists in line and ready to donate and phone bank for two more incremental steps in the 'right' direction instead of attempting to systemically change the constraints of power and the political process.

Tim is right that an effective public plan option would be a system changer that would effectively tilt the political playing field to Democrats for at least a generation or two in much the same way that Social Security and Medicare are high salience, high effectiveness boundary conditions for Democrats to lean on. However the Democrats who would benefit from these changes are not neccessarily the Democrats who are currently in power or more importantly, currently occupying critical blocking positions. So reform that can shave off several points of GDP on health expenditures, improve coverage and re-align US politics is not a winning solution for the key set of stakeholders; instead their winning solution is to do just enough to avoid overwhelming political costs and pressure.

Specter is in trouble... (again)

By Fester:

My great fear of not having Senator Specter's career circling the toilet to write about when I have nothing else to write will not be realized.

Rasmussen reports a race where the fundamental dynamics are working against Senator Specter in the Democratic Primary:

1* Suppose the Democratic Primary for the 2010 United States Senate were held today. Would you vote for Arlen Specter or Joe Sestak?
51% Specter
32% Sestak
4% Some other candidate
13% Not sure

Sure Senator Specter is up by 19 in this poll, which is a significant improvement from being down by half a dozen in the last polling on the Republican Primary before he flipped caucuses, but this is a weak position compared to Joe Lieberman in 2006. The Pennsylvania Democratic Primary is about ten months out. Two months out, Ned Lamont was trailing Senator Lieberman by fifteen points in the Democratic Primary that Mr. Lamont went on to win. Several weeks out, Rep. Toomey was trailing by fifteen points in the 2004 Republican Primary. He closed the gap by thirteen points by primary day. A well funded and well run campaign by a competent candidate who only has to make up two points per month against an incumbent with 100% name ID and little passionate support is in very good shape.