A plain blog about politics

Unleash Chiang/Chang/Shang!!!

2012-01-30T17:41:00.000-06:00

By far the funniest thing of the day is the revelation that, through the Bush family, Chiang Kai-shek has morphed into "a mythical conservative warrior." That's a link to Dan Larison's fine discussion, which will also link you way back to Brad DeLong's original catch on this from way back in 2005. There's some question as to whether Jeb Bush knew the origin of the phrase "unleashing Chiang" or not, with Tim Noah believing that Jeb did but Marco Rubio didn't. Click over and read the whole, wonderful, story.

All I can say is: Shaka, when the walls fell.

I'll also add, for whatever it's worth, that Li Shang is a hero in the excellent 1998 Disney movie "Mulan." He's not exactly a mythical conservative warrior, but he is a warrior, and it is a myth, although Jeb's kids were a bit too old to have gone with him to see it. Despite singing like Donny Osmond. Could Disney's Shang have somehow combined with G.H.W. Bush's Chiang? I sure am curious.

Less relevantly, I see that Grandmother Fa in that movie was voiced by June Foray and sung by Marni Nixon. Wow! You're not going to get better than that...my sense is that Mulan hasn't quite been as successful as some of the others of that era, but in my view it's right in the first tier with Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid.

Plum Line: Nominations (plus some Housekeeping)

2012-01-30T17:11:00.000-06:00

Over at Plum Line today: an update on the next steps with exec branch and judicial nominations, in light of Senator Mike Lee's threat to put holds on everything.

Meanwhile: it's a record-breaking month for traffic here at Plain Blog, and I want thank each and every one of you. Also, thanks to everyone for links and tweets, and to those readers who use the "share" button. Thank you!

With traffic up, I'm thinking of switching to short daily links posts, instead of the once-a-week or so with an irregular schedule that I've always done. I might try it out for a while and see if it takes...among other things, I've recently switched over to doing a morning school drop-off for one of my kids, and I've noticed that I'm finding it hard to get a first substantive post up early, so that might work. I might also fold in links to new stuff that I've written elsewhere...I'm not really sure. Anyway, I'm happy to take suggestions about any of this if you have them. I might even come up with a different title for my links posts, but I am sort of fond of my traditional one, so I'm not sure about that yet.

Final Word (I Hope!) on Late Entrant

2012-01-30T15:15:00.000-06:00

The final word, I hope, on the impossibility of a late entrant into the GOP nomination battle at this point goes to Josh Putnam, who has a data-filled post detailing all the filing deadlines and other technical problems with a new candidacy at this point.

The only think I want to add to this, other than you should definitely use his info and not the stuff that I've been citing in previous posts, is that there's a danger here of getting too caught up in the technicalities of all of this. I know -- I've been contributing to this a bit. And it's worth knowing the technical stuff, to be sure.

But step back, and you'll realize that it's been too late for months. When I was talking about this in 2010 and 2011, I speculated that the real window closed for most candidates in spring 2011, and for the most well-positioned candidate on the sideline -- presumably Jeb Bush -- sometime in the summer or late summer. Oh, a candidate certainly could have technically entered the race in September 2011. But a true new entrant at that point would be starting with an enormous disadvantage in resources, whether we're talking money, or organization, or candidate experience on the campaign trail. We saw some of that with Rick Perry, who wasn't really a complete new entrant (remember, he had already published a campaign book before he got in, and certainly had been prepping for the race for some time). It would have been that much worse for a real new entrant.

One of the reasons Mitt Romney has done so well this cycle is precisely because he's been running for president nonstop for about seven years. You don't have to do it that way; Barack Obama really did enter fairly late in the process, as far as I know. It sure helps, though.

Is Florida About Money or the Party?

2012-01-30T10:14:00.000-06:00

One of the things that you're going to hear a lot of is that Mitt Romney's big win in Florida tomorrow -- and per the polling, it looks certain -- wasn't caused by debates or Newt's crazy moon rhetoric or the support of party leaders, but by Romney's money advantage. Jonathan Chait, for example:

Mitt Romney is pulling away in Florida, which has less to do with a “more focused message” or increased “swagger,” or any other narrative the press reads into it, than a simple ability to spend Newt Gingrich into the ground. (The television ad disparity has been about four to one.)

I agree with this to some extent, but there's another major factor involved, which is the spin control exercised by party leaders.

It's not just that a significant number of GOP opinion leaders were bashing Newt. What's probably more important is that as far as I can see absolutely no one -- with the exception of Sarah Palin, I guess -- hit Romney for running a vicious attack campaign against a fellow Republican. Meanwhile, Newt was severely disciplined by those same opinion leaders when he (and Rick Perry) attacked Romney's business practices.

Imagine, for example, if Rick Perry had done well and it was a Romney/Perry race, with party leaders splitting between them but believing both were acceptable. I strongly suspect that if Romney went all scorched earth against Perry in that scenario that many neutral party leaders would start talking about how Ronald Reagan never ran a negative ad in his life (doesn't matter if it's true or not) and about how Romney should dial it back some. They might also quietly warn Romney that if he didn't cut back that he'd feel the consequences in fundraising and other resources. Meanwhile, Perry would have plenty of surrogates to go on every Fox News program to knock the ads down, and those surrogates would have a very sympathetic hearing much of the time.

Remember, we're talking here about GOP primary voters. That's a relatively high-information group. Virtually all of them, I'd guess, watch Fox News instead of CNN (or, obviously, MSNBC). Quite a few of them listen to Rush Limbaugh or other conservative talk radio hosts, and some of them read conservative blogs. Remember too that most of them are inclined to like all of the candidates: after all, they're all on Team GOP. So they may tend to resist stuff they're hearing in ads if they also hear evidence to the contrary from their favorite talk radio show. After all, we expect each and every one of them to completely discount the attacks they'll be seeing from Barack Obama in a few months. But if party leaders are inviting Romney to continue, even if that's just by staying quiet, well, that's going to make a difference.

It's also worth mentioning that fundraising is connected to party support, so the fact that Romney has such a large lead is at least to some extent a function of party choice, and not Romney's abilities.

On the whole, then, I suspect that what's happening in Florida is very much a party story, and even less of a candidate story than one might think.

Sunday Question for Liberals

2012-01-29T13:23:00.000-06:00

Same question that I asked of conservatives. With the debates winding down for this cycle, what lessons if any should Democrats learn for 2016 about the way they were organized? What worked? What didn't?

Of course, the incentives of individual candidates and of the potential sponsors of debates may well differ from those of the party as a whole. But to the extent that the party could change things, what should be changed and what should be retained?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

2012-01-29T12:41:00.000-06:00

We may be done with the debates, so it's perhaps a good time to look back: what about the debates worked? What didn't work? What should Republicans, as a party, attempt to do differently next time around?

What Mattered This Week?

2012-01-28T15:28:00.000-06:00

Seemed like an eventful week to me in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan...that's a lot.

The 4th amendment case decided this week, US v. Jones, seemed important to me.

I don't really think there's much left of importance in the nomination fight. Romney moved ahead of Newt in Florida, but that just means (assuming it holds up) that there will be less irrelevant hype after Tuesday. Romney is going to have to pretend it's a contest through Super Tuesday at this point no matter what happens in Florida. Watch to see if Rick Santorum has a late surge into second place, but so far it's not happening. There were also some new unflattering details about Romney's finances and background; not a plus for him, but unlikely to matter much.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Friday Baseball Post

2012-01-28T00:00:00.000-06:00

Grumble grumble Sabean grumble grumble.

There's no shortstop. There's really no LF. I've been reading all winter about how Aubrey Huff is in terrific shape and all, but we all know that guys who are 35 and coming off a terrible year and have only been good two of the last five years aren't going to return to peak, and are probably going to be awful, no matter what they say in January.

Sabean has some real strengths as a GM, but there's really no reason for this team to not be gearing up for a serious pennant run this year, and as of now he's just not doing it. You just don't want to waste peak years of major stars because you leave massive holes in your lineup.

One of the things that Sabean has always been terrible at is figuring out when there are windows of opportunity and acting on them (or, on the other hand, realizing that it's not the right year and using the time to improve for the future. I hate to just complain about the guy -- again, he has some serious strengths. But it sure is frustrating rooting for his teams.

"Establishment"

2012-01-27T15:56:00.000-06:00

Andrew Sullivan took aim earlier this week at the notion that there's any "Republican establishment" out there to stand up to Newt Gingrich:

I'm not sure what this phrase means or represents any more - the Chamber of Commerce? John Boehner? The Bush family? But the concept of a responsible, sane, pragmatic party leadership able to corral or coax or manage a party's base is, it seems to me, a preposterous fiction on its face, as we are seeing. The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin.

Andrew Sprung called this "a crowbar to the political scientists' notion of a Republican 'party establishment.'" I should take a minute to explain where I stand on this.

I try very hard not to use the word "establishment," precisely because I have no idea what it means. Nor do I think that "insider" vs. "outsider" is usually a useful category. In normal politics, people use those labels as part of the rhetoric of intraparty (and interparty for that matter) competition, which is interesting in terms of political culture and public opinion but tells us little about influence within parties. What I talk about are party actors, and (less often and more problematically) party leaders. I can't speak for all political scientists on this one, but that's who we should be talking about, in my view. These party actors include a lot of people: politicians, campaign and governing professionals, activists, formal party officials and staff, leaders of party-aligned interest groups, and the partisan press.

Some of those may be in the working majority of the party; some may not be. There's no theoretical reason to believe that everyone within any category will agree on anything, nor that people will agree across categories. That is, a party may have a situation in which the activists lean one way and the Washington-based politicians and others lean the other, but it's equally possible that activists will be split, or campaign professionals will be split, etc. Nor is there any theoretical expectation, in my view -- and here I differ from others who think about parties, I believe -- that one or another of these groups will be the most influential. In other words, I don't think that parties are "really" their politicians, or "really" the interest group which align with them, or "really" their formal organizations. Instead, I believe that any of those are possible, and that it's an empirical question which portion of the party is most influential in any particular time and place.

With me so far? What I'm saying is that influence within political parties is at least potentially contested, and nominations -- especially for the highest office -- are where those fights, fights which define what the party is, take place. Of course, sometimes there's no fight because everyone, or most everyone, agrees. When that's the case, it's very hard for us to see who is actually more influential. At other times, there are fights, and then we can get a better sense of who wields influence, but it can be extremely hard to study this stuff, because it's not a simple matter of casting votes or other easily counted indicators. Some party actors give money. Others make public endorsements. But some exert their influence in less visible ways, such as by spreading overall impressions of candidates within the party network. That's the kind of thing that's hard to get at without a lot of careful work. Remember, even the people involved may have inaccurate perceptions of who has the most influence.

Now, back to "Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin." Are they the most powerful players in the Republican Party? We don't know! We certainly know that if the GOP-aligned partisan press is united against a candidate in a nomination fight, that candidate will lose; after all, most GOP primary voters get most of their information from the partisan press, and believe what they hear. But that's not enough to tell us that Rush and Ailes are the critical players here. We don't know how much autonomy any individual talk show host, or even the head of Fox News, has, and it's very difficult at best to figure it out. I'm certain that they're not all-powerful, that there are at powerful constraints preventing them from just choosing on their own. After all, there's a death sentence that the party can pronounce on any of them: Not Conservative. RINO. But of course that's begging the question: who gets to declare someone else Not Conservative? Who can do it and have it stick?

So: certainly, Rush and Fox News are highly visible actors within the GOP, and certainly, they do a lot to originate or spread the ways that Republicans talk about things. Who exactly has the most influence within the party, however, is a much more complicated question. It's not best answered, in my view, by focusing only on the most visible actors, nor by positing that there's an "establishment/insurgent" split -- the latter just doesn't seem to fit very well.

When it comes to claims from me and others that (as Cohen et al. put it) The Party Decides, what we're saying -- at least what I'm saying -- is not that a party establishment trumps other party actors. It's that party actors are more important than the other players in the process: the (neutral) press; rank-and-file voters; and the candidates themselves, at least thought of as individual actors outside of the party (one way that the party controls things is through the transformation of self-interested candidates into party-oriented candidacies). That wasn't especially true for a variety of reasons, in my view, in the immediate post-reform era, at least on the Democratic side (that is, in the 1972 and 1976 cycles), which among other things reminds us that it doesn't always have to work that way. But by the 1984 cycle and going forward, it seems to be the case. It just isn't plausible these days for a candidate who is opposed by a sufficient number of sufficiently important party actors, whether individuals or groups, to get a nomination, no matter how able that candidate is at appealing to voters. The party, collectively, just controls too many resources that are needed to win nominations, whether it's money, or positive publicity, or personnel.

Again, that doesn't preclude intraparty fights, or predict who will win those fights. And it doesn't mean that the views of rank-and-file voters are irrelevant: those voters are often the constituents of party actors, who therefore care what they want (they also are used by party actors as clues to a candidate's electibility, for better or worse). Recall, too, that parties are permeable; it's generally very easy for rank-and-file voters to become party actors, although of course how influential they'll be depends on lots of things. But when we try to figure out what's up in these contests, the place to start is by thinking about where the party is. Not the mythical "establishment," whatever that is, but all of the party -- that is, all party actors. That's going to get us a lot farther down the road than any other form of analysis.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-27T14:38:00.000-06:00

To Ed Kilgore over at Washington Monthly, who read the WSJ editorial page, and so he deserves some sort of compensation. In this case, it was the WSJ's crazed support for the idea that the only reason anyone is concerned about climate change is immediate self-interest. As Kilgore says:

Gee, you’d think in all this tough-minded truth-telling about those with a financial stake in the climate change debate the Journal might have noted in passing that the most powerful economic interests on the planet have an interest in doing nothing about it.

Oh well. Kevin Drum piles on:

Climate change isn't merely wrong — that would be boring — it's an immense conspiracy being waged by a group of nerdy scientists (who want funding) and tree huggers (who are desperate to control everyone else's lives). And it's a damn successful conspiracy, too. Despite the fact that it requires thousands and thousands of participants from nearly every country in the world, with new collaborators earning PhDs every month, not a single one of them has broken the climate omerta yet and blown the whole thing open. But someone will, any day now. Just you wait.

Just to try to add a bit of value of my own here...while Drum, I think correctly, talks about long-term conspiracy theorizing on the right, I would add that a lot of the way conservatives talk now is very much driven by embarrassing presidential candidate and failed and disgraced Speaker Newt Gingrich. The other thing I'll say, and I should mention that this is purely speculative, is that in my view this kind of rhetoric is utterly ineffective at persuading anyone, and if anything tends to hurt with undecideds; what it's mainly good for is manipulating people who are already inclined to agree with you. Which is great if your goal is to squeeze more money out of your marks, but not particularly useful if you actually want to achieve policy goals.

Hey, Reporters! (Debate Edition)

2012-01-27T11:31:00.000-06:00

I've seen a few commenters (see for example here) treat the Florida debate audience last night as autonomous actors, neutral (between candidates) partisans who were honestly reacting to what they heard from the stage. I also read my brother the expert Romney-watcher's tweet during the action:

Strange that it took the Romney campaign 19 takes to realize that they should pack the debate hall.

I'm inclined to believe that it was a packed hall, and not spontaneous reactions -- but I don't know! Hey, reporters: first of all, we really should know whether Romney packed the hall or not last night. Second, and more basically: the audiences at GOP debates this year were a big story, and one that was underreported throughout. I know a lot of reporters are at this things live; who is packing the audience and how effectively should be a standard part of every debate story.

Pundits watching: be careful. And, I guess, I have to recommend this of all things: be more cynical. Please don't assume that debate audiences are a random cross-section of party voters. It's possible -- but campaigns rarely leave to chance those things that they can control, and if you don't know, it's safest to assume that an enthusiastic crowd is that way for a reason.

Plum Line: General Election Reset

2012-01-27T10:16:00.000-06:00

With new GDP numbers out and Mitt Romney in command of the nomination, my Plum Line post today looks ahead to the general election. Key point: Mitt Romney is shaping up to very much be a generic Republican candidate, and the out-party candidate just doesn't matter all that much against an incumbent president.

That said, I think there are two things I'd add. One is that I'd recommend forgetting all about Romney's weaknesses within the GOP. Once he clinches, I don't see anything that would keep the party from rallying around him. His weak polling numbers now just don't matter much. On the other hand, it's worth noting that "generic Republican" these days includes some fairly unpopular positions on public policy. Romney has endorsed the House (Ryan) budget from last year and taken other ideologically driven positions (and that's before we get to the party platform, which is sure to offer the Democrats more ammunition). We do know that perceived ideological extremism is a general election negative, and Obama should be able to push public perceptions of Romney's positioning, even if it won't be as effective as it would have been against Rick Perry, or for that matter Michele Bachmann.

Florida CNN Debate

2012-01-26T22:21:00.000-06:00

My debate wrap is up over at Plum Line. Short version: Newt got clobbered.

Here's your question for the night. Going in, Nate Silver's model (which is a weighted average over recent polls, with current momentum projected out to election day) says Florida is Mitt 40%, Newt 36%, Santorum 12%, Paul 10%. Newt was awful tonight, and I'll be shocked if it isn't spun that way within the GOP partisan press, since so many people have it in for the former Speaker. He also has Romney throwing a massive wall of attack ads at him on Florida TV. Santorum had a very solid night, and as far as I know he isn't being targeted on TV, at least not heavily. So: what are the odds that Santorum surges and clears, say, 20%? 25%? 30%?

Of course, I've pretty much always thought that Santorum was a bigger threat to Romney than Newt was -- even after South Carolina. Also, and I apologize for the self-congratulation but I'm sort of proud of this one: I pointed out last week that Newt's debate reputation was a fraud. Anyway, what probably happens now is that Romney wins Florida easily, but there's still time for that to go awry. What's not going to happen is Newt Gingrich becoming the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

Oh Those Debates

2012-01-26T15:13:00.000-06:00

I have a new column over at Salon talking about the debates as a (not very reliable) form of vetting the candidates.

The history of this is important, I think. I tend to believe that media vetting as a consequence of the sequential nomination process is a reasonably effective solution to a real problem, which has to do (as I talk about in that piece) with the tremendous expansion of the number of legitimate party actors. I'll be interested in whether the more historically-minded commenters here agree with my reading of that. The problem, however, is that substituting a string of a dozen or two dozen debates for the sequential system is unlikely to work as well. That's not entirely what Republicans have done, but one could argue that they're going down that path.

At any rate, one more debate tonight, and then it's almost over: nothing scheduled for a few weeks, and only a handful of scheduled debates remaining, with no guarantee that any more will actually take place if Romney wins big on Tuesday in Florida. You can be sure that CNN will do what they can to bring on the fireworks tonight...I'll be tweeting as usual, and then I'll post a wrap over at Greg's place, and perhaps more here if there's something to add.

Picking VPs

2012-01-26T12:04:00.000-06:00

There's a hit piece up on Reuters today attacking logical GOP vice presidential choice Marco Rubio, hitting him on everything from his personal finances to his (supposed) lack of appeal to non-Cuban Hispanics. Among other things, it has him voting against Sonia Sotomayor, which is flat-out wrong (she was confirmed in 2009 and he didn't arrive in the Senate until 2011), so I have no idea how accurate the rest of the stuff that's being thrown at him might be.

Will Rubio be the VP choice? I don't think anyone can predict it; these choices are highly idiosyncratic. As far as I know, all we can say is that sometimes the nomination runner-up gets the pick (Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, John Edwards), and sometimes it's someone else. But Rubio would seem to be logical in some senses, what with being from a large swing state and presumably appealing to a large, important demographic group, whatever Reuters wants to tell us.

Logical, except as the article reminds us, for one thing: he hasn't been vetted by a presidential nomination campaign. As I've said, that's really the thing that's separated the awful selections (Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Tom Eagleton, Gerry Ferraro, Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin) from everyone else. In which "awful selection" means that they either were significant campaign problems or, if elected, resigned to avoid jail time. There's simply no better vetting process than a presidential campaign. Of those who went through one, only John Edwards really turned out to be a serious problem, and that was years later; he was fine during 2004. VP candidates Jack Kemp, George H.W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Al Gore all were just fine (as were Lloyd Bentsen and Walter Mondale, each of whom had previously sort-of run, although I wouldn't count those races for this exercise.

The problem, for the Republicans, assuming Mitt Romney is the nominee, is that they're not doing a great job of producing a pool of presidential candidates who have been vetted by a campaign while also holding orthodox views on policy positions the party cares about and having conventional credentials. This round, we have Rick Perry, who was vetted but found wanting; he seems an unlikely pick. Tim Pawlenty diminished himself with his run, and at any rate really didn't stay in long enough to have received the press attention that vetting requires, although it's probably better than nothing. Maybe Rick Santorum? He doesn't really have conventional credentials, since those usually don't include an electoral drubbing, but maybe.

OK, last time around. Fred Thompson is old and hasn't been in office for almost a decade; nope. Rudy Giuliani? Obviously not. Not the fringe candidates, or the ones who dropped out very early (Sam Brownback ran? Oh yeah). There is one, though: Mike Huckabee.

If you go back to 2000, you could add Lamar Alexander, except that he's even older than Fred Thompson, and you could also perhaps add John Kasich.

If Romney asked me for advice, I'd probably say that the do-no-harm list is Pawlenty and Huckabee, and I'd be very much leaning towards the Huck. But the other part of this is that if for whatever reason Romney or important GOP groups find both of them unacceptable, then Romney will wind up with someone who hasn't been through the process. And while that certainly can work, it's a risky move with very little upside.

Replace Update -- Now With (Perhaps) News!

2012-01-26T10:26:00.000-06:00

Sarah Kliff reported yesterday something that this blog has an obligation to note, which is that House Republicans, in particular Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee Chair Joe Pitts, are making noises about producing a "replace" bill this spring as part of their long-promised "repeal and replace" pledge. Since I had a running item for the first half of 2011 focusing on how phony the "replace" portion of that appeared to be, and then gave up on the item since they weren't even bothering to pretend that they were going to move on "replace", I certainly need to pay attention.

And, if they do move a bill, I'll be impressed. But we're not actually there yet. As Kliff reports,the best Pitts can do now is the same rhetorical pieces that Republicans have been touting since 2008. They haven't become a bill and passed the House yet probably because those things don't really add up to a bill, at least not one that would accomplish the two things they'll probably want to do: match the popular features of ACA, and get a decent score from CBO. At least without including the bits of ACA that people don't like.

So: Pitts claims that a "replace" bill will be introduced "shortly after the Supreme Court rules on the health reform law." We'll see, and we'll see if the bill really does move through the House. I'll give them credit for keeping their promise if it happens. I'm not especially optimistic I'll have to do that.

Why All the Surges? We Don't Know, Yet

2012-01-26T08:40:00.000-06:00

The Hotline's Tim Alberta tweeted something yesterday that I think a lot of people have been thinking, and not just because various pundits have been saying it:

Polls this cycle have been all over the place, yet they consistently show how momentum is derived largely from debate performances

Caution, everyone. All of us who are following the election closely are very much aware of the debates. But that's simply not the only thing going on. Since December, there are ad wars in all of the early primary states, with saturation levels of TV ads, presumably accompanied by other forms of advertising. There are also candidate appearances and local news hits. Each early state has its own local conservative talk radio hosts. And then there's the various nationally syndicated radio hosts, plus Fox News. On top of all that, there's straight news coverage, including on those local news shows and within the GOP-aligned partisan press, of campaign developments including not only debates but also polls and primary results. All of these may produce direct and indirect effects, including pure "momentum" effects when inattentive voters who like all the candidates simply tell pollsters they support the candidate they most recently heard something good about. And of course saying that "debate performances" moved polling numbers is also dicey just by itself; impressions of those performances can be unmediated for those who watch the debates in full and nothing else, or mediated by the press and party actors for those who learn (or remember) what happened from news recaps, sound bites, and whatever pundits and talk show hosts choose to talk about.

Getting back to debates vs. everything else: most of that, to most of us who are not in the state that's preparing for a primary this week, is mostly or entirely invisible. The debates, on the other hand, are extremely visible. Later on, with any luck we'll get some good analysis that can attempt to sort out all these effects. Including why we're getting all these large swings (Nate Silver today suggested the old Mickey Kaus effect; I'm sticking with the "no heavyweight" theory). But for now we should all be very cautious, in my view, about leaping to the conclusion that the most visible thing to us is the one that's pushing all the polling.

Plum Line: Nominations Reform

2012-01-25T15:17:00.000-06:00

Up over at Plum Line, my reaction to Barack Obama's SOTU proposal that all executive branch and judicial nominations get a "simple or down vote" within 90 days.

Generally, I'm not a huge fan of that specific plan -- I think it goes too far in weakening the Senate's role and the role of individual Senators -- but I think it's very good that Obama is at least getting engaged in the fight. Just to recap my reform preferences...on exec branch nominations, I'm for simple majority confirmation, but preserving if possible individual or small-group holds for the purposes of negotiating some specific district issue (with the Majority Leader, as he is now, empowered to decide which holds to respect). On judges, I like the guaranteed 90 day vote, but I'm OK with filibusters, especially at the appellate level, although I'm open to changing the exact supermajority needed. So: protect intense individual-Senator minorities on exec branch nominees, and intense partisan or ideological majorities on judges. On top of that, I suppose a major effort to streamline executive branch vetting.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-25T13:15:00.001-06:00

Goes to Jared Bernstein (no relation!), who spotted a complete travesty by Politifact:

OMG…this is beyond preposterous.
“In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”
This is not half true or two-thirds true. It is just true.

Politifact—the self-anointed fact checkers—grade this statement from the President speech tonight as “half-true:”

As he explains, Politifact's problem with the statement is that in their view, since the president said it, he must be taking credit for the job gains despite not actually being legitimately responsible for them. Note that the president didn't actually say that he was responsible. In other words, they're grading the president as a almost-liar because of the implication that they read into a simple factual statement.

Jared Bernstein gets results! Lots of bloggers have picked up on this, and lo and behold Politifact has actually backed off...a bit. It's now "mostly true." With the same explanation, only now they concede that, well, Obama didn't actually say that he was responsible for those jobs.

It's still, even with the correction, properly described as "beyond preposterous."

And it's not just that particular fact. Politifact also went after "Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years" on the same basis, giving it a "Mostly True." Here's how that one went. First, they devoted 500 words to showing that the specific words they were examining were, in fact, true. They then conclude:

We think Obama’s phrasing suggests that he thinks the administration’s policies have played a role, saying, for instance, that "over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration." But we also think he does so cautiously.
Our ruling
Obama was correct when he said that "right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years." We think he may have overstated his administration’s role in achieving that, but not wildly so. We rate the claim Mostly True.

Huh? Here's the quote from the president:

Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right – eight years. Not only that – last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

There is no claim here to check! Obama simply did not say that his administration caused more oil production. He didn't say they caused a little of it, a lot of it, or all of it. How can you fact check this non-claim?

Does Politifact believe that politicians should never present absolutely true factual information without disclosing that, in fact, they are not responsible? Mitch Daniels, in his SOTU response, voiced " admiration for the strong family commitment that he and the First Lady have displayed to a nation sorely needing such examples." Should Politifact downgrade that one to "Mostly True" because Daniels isn't actually responsible for the Obamas' marriage?

Sorry for the length of this, but there's more! Politifact rated "General Motors is back on top as the world’s No. 1 automaker" as "Half-True." This one hasn't been updated, at least not yet, and it's just as bad. Politifact, again, downgrades the statement because "crediting the bailout with GM's No. 1 spot is a stretch." But here, the case is pretty clear; the bailout may not have been sufficient for the recovery of GM, but it certainly was necessary. And once again, Politifact apparently has no problem at all with the specific steps Obama claims his administration took, or the claims he makes about where GM is now. Indeed, they don't even dispute the claim, which I think it's fair to say that Obama does make here, that the two are connected. Their only problem, which is enough to downgrade the whole statement, is that an entirely unstated claim that Obama deserves full credit would be wrong.

Oh, Politifact did have one other problem with the GM claim: Apparently industry watchers believe there was luck involved in GM happening to be on top just now. Which they cited, apparently in all seriousness, as a problem with the claim that GM is #1. I suppose I should also never mention the Giants 2010 World Series win without mentioning that the 2010 version of Edgar Renteria wasn't all that likely to hit two home runs in five games. Yikes!

Look: I didn't participate in the Politifact-bashing after their both-sides-do-it lie of the year fiasco, but this is just terrible stuff. The only real reason to do fact checking is to provide some incentives for politicians to stick to at least the literal truth. Obama did it in all three of these cases -- by Politifact's own research -- and yet they aren't rewarding him for it. Awful.

And: nice catch!

Gabby Giffords

2012-01-25T10:58:00.000-06:00

Gabby Giffords, Member of the House from Arizona, resigned today in a tear-filled ceremony on the House floor, after showing up for Barack Obama's State of the Union last night. She says she'll be back; I wouldn't bet against her.

I think the thing to remember about Giffords is that before she was shot she was widely regarded as having a huge future. Of course, one can never tell how these things will play out, but she certainly would have been on the short list of Democrats to run for the open Arizona Senate seat this year; her mentions for that after Jon Kyl announced he was retiring may have been unrealistic during her recovery, but she was very much a rising star in Democratic politics, and my guess is that without the assassination attempt she would have run, won the nomination, and had a very solid shot at winning in November. And if that happened? With four years in the Senate, a presumably moderately liberal voting record, and a great personal story, she would certainly have been at least mentioned for Vice President in 2016. And after that? Who knows?

Now, of course you could probably say similar things about a few dozen Members of the House...but that leaves a few hundred who have no such potential. With any luck, Giffords will have as full a recovery as possible, and go on to whatever accomplishments she wants, whether in politics or not. It's great to see how far she's already come. But for now at least, the people of Arizona and the US House have really lost a good one.

SOTU

2012-01-25T00:44:00.001-06:00

I just now finished watching Barack Obama's State of the Union speech. A bit on the late side. Certainly a different experience for me than most recent such events, since I taped it and then watched without the benefit, or distraction, of following along on twitter. So outside of the NYT headline, I haven't seen any reactions at all.

Now, as usual, this is more theater review than anything else; as regular readers know, I don't think the rhetorical flourishes or anything else about the style of the speech make much of a difference to anything. Still, he is the president, and there's nothing wrong with talking about how he did, as long as no one makes any claims about what effect it's going to have. I should say to that the substance can matter -- initiatives he mentioned tonight have a greater chance of action this year than those he ignored, and even if they don't get through Congress this year it still almost certainly boosts their long-term prospects. But I don't have much to say about that sort of substance, other than I thought he was more hawkish than he needed to be on Iran -- and that I'm glad he at least nodded in the direction of nomination reform, which I'll have more to say about in the future.

As far as style...well, it was better than last year, when I thought the writing was seriously off. This year, they mostly dropped rhetorical flourishes, fortunately, outside of a relatively lame (but presumably politically canny) frame about how America should work together just like the troops did when they killed bin Laden. In case, that is, anyone forgot who was president when that happened. Because it was Obama, you know. In case you forgot. So there was that at the beginning and the end, and in between? It was fine. It was okay. It was, as Bill McNeill would have said, full of adequasivity. Not a single memorable phrase, other than a truly unfortunate joke about spilling milk. On the other hand, not a single memorable phrase. The thing was very much structured as a campaign document, which is no surprise, with plenty of campaign themes telegraphed and plenty of inoculation against attacks the White House expects are coming. Most of that, again with the exception of the hawkish Iran stuff, seemed harmless to me. At this point, it probably makes sense to talk up the economic recovery; if people feel that he's out of touch by doing so, he's probably toast anyway, so might as well make with the happy talk and try to build on improvements in economic confidence, even if they are so far at very low levels.

As for the delivery. Three years in, Obama still hasn't found a way to make the setting work for him -- which isn't unusual; the only one I remember who did was Bill Clinton, although Ronald Reagan wasn't bad. Clinton, at least in my memory, treated the people in the room as people, not as props, and that seemed to work. Obama seems to go back and forth between speaking to the room and speaking over their heads to us. To me, I don't feel that he winds up connecting with either (and, again, just to be clear, I'm talking about how he delivers Joint Session speeches and not claiming that it Means Anything or will affect anything).

Oh, I watched Mitch Daniels, too. Again, I haven't read any reviews, but all I could think of is that whoever gave him this thankless task surely wasn't trying to boost his presidential chances, whether (implausibly) for this year or for the future. It's an impossible task, and one which he did about as well as anyone else: in other words, it was terrible.

Exec Branch Appointments Update

2012-01-24T16:40:00.000-06:00

Suzy Khimm has some good reporting on the current state of executive branch appointments. As she says, it's a bit of a muddle right now, with some hints that Republicans will retaliate for Barack Obama's recent recess appointments, and some hints that it's the GOP that will back down.

Here's my prediction: for the most part, Republicans will mostly keep their current obstruction level the same. They'll still insist on 60 votes on most nominations, and still use holds to slow many nominations, but they'll still cut deals to allow some appointments to get to final votes.

Why? Khimm has some of the reasons -- in part, it's because Obama has already been compromising by selecting people who Republicans actually want for some positions. It's also true that if Republicans believe that they will capture the White House and the Senate next year, they might want to avoid setting an even worse precedent than they already have (yes, I know a lot of people believe that Republicans will simply eliminate the filibuster in that case, but for individual Senators that's not an ideal solution, and it's not at all clear it would happen -- after all, it didn't during George W. Bush's presidency).

The other way to look at it, however, it that the situation just hasn't changed much, and if it has it's in the White House's favor. After all, Republicans presumably didn't increase their obstruction last year because it wasn't in their interest to do so, for whatever reasons. It wasn't because they were being nice, or because they hadn't yet decided that Obama was a Kenyan socialist who had to be stopped. Nothing, then, has changed that calculus. Moreover, if part of the reason for their restraint (such as it is, which of course wasn't much) was presumably fear that if they pushed too hard, he would negate that obstruction with recess appointments. That's still the case! After all, Obama so far has only used extraordinary recess appointments in extraordinary cases (the so-called nullification cases). He could easily extend that to lots of other offices, however, and having done it once there's a lot less constraint on him doing so.

Granted, people don't always do what's in their best interests, and so a bit of a tantrum for a while isn't surprising. But soon enough, Republicans are likely to realize that they now have more of an incentive to cut deals, not less.

Deadlocked, Not Brokered (Is the Kind of Convention We Won't Be Having)

2012-01-24T14:26:00.000-06:00

I know: there's just no way I can hope to get people from speculating about a convention in which no candidate enters with 50% plus one of the delegates. And, you know, there's nothing theoretically impossible about it. It could have happened in 1984, if Jesse Jackson had been a bit stronger. It's possible to imagine a left-libertarian candidate running on a platform similar to Gary Johnson's managing to force it in 2008 on the Democratic side. There's good reason why it doesn't happen (the logic of winnowing), and I'm confident that it won't happen this time, but it could.

But please: if you want to speculate about this (and I'm looking at you, Nate Silver), please, please, call it a deadlocked convention. Not a brokered convention. One more time: there are no brokers. Delegates are generally slated by the candidates, and while they are likely to be loyal to those candidates in terms of continuing to support them while they are in the race, there's no particular reason to think that Newt Gingrich, say, could deliver his delegates to another candidate. Nor are there any other organized groups within the party who have that sort of relationship with delegates.

"Brokered" conventions evoke thoughts of the pre-reformed process, when delegate chairs absolutely could deliver their entire delegation; that's because most delegates were selected by and represented state or local formal party organizations. Those formal party organizations in turn might have standing arrangements with party-aligned organized interest groups. The idea was that in general what was important wasn't the individual delegates, but the organized groups which controlled blocks of delegates. Really controlled: in most cases, the delegates were bound by prior arrangement to do whatever the delegation boss wanted. At any rate, again in most cases, bucking the boss would have real consequences within the formal party organization.

That simply isn't the case any more. At best, I suspect that Ron Paul's delegates are probably sufficiently dedicated to him that they would do whatever he asks, but even then I'm not sure...and more to the point, each one would be free to choose whatever he or she wanted to do. No one who is in Tampa for the GOP convention this summer is going to lose their job if they defy the state delegation chair, or in most cases suffer any consequences at all for candidate choice in the (extremely unlikely) even that the convention is thrown open. Other, that is, from whatever consequences come from failing to support the winner, especially if that candidate reaches the White House.

Because of all that, if there ever is a convention in which no candidate enters with 50% plus one of the delegates, the outcome would be not only unpredictable, but presumably quite chaotic. Now, it's possible that some set of party leaders (who? who would accept them as leaders?) could sit down and work out a deal in which they all support a compromise candidate, and it's possible that delegates might choose to accept that conclusion. If so, it would be an individual decision by each delegate. It's also possible that full chaos could break out, with no established procedure for pushing delegates to a consensus, and no one with the authority to force delegates to accept a newly-drafted procedure. Really bad results for the party -- a deadlock lasting weeks, the convention splitting in two with each nominating a different candidate and then fighting over ballot slots, all sorts of ugliness -- would all be very possible. We're also talking about 4000 obscure people (more, in the Democrats' case) who would suddenly be reality TV stars. You want to bet that none of them turn out to be deeply embarrassing to the party?

Anyway, back to the main point. If you really have to speculate about this stuff, and I certainly understand the temptation to do so: it's a deadlocked convention, not a brokered convention. There are no brokers. You can't have a brokered convention without brokers. Deadlocked convention. That's the term you want to use.

Read Stuff, You Should

2012-01-24T11:53:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the slow blogging today around here. Part of that is that I have a new column over at TNR talking about the State of the Union speech, in which I say more or less what Ezra Klein said in Wonkbook this morning. And today's Plum Line post was about economic confidence and the 2012 election. But after you get to those, more good stuff:

1. Speaking of the SOTU, Matt Glassman has a nice essay up about the importance of the ceremonial aspects of the address. Well worth reading. I've been lucky enough to have attended one Joint Session presidential address, and I agree with Glassman: rituals of democracy are important.

2. And Politico has an incredibly cool word-graph of SOTU history. Fun.

2. Noah Smith reviews the GOP's version of economic history.

3. Gaffes, from Brendan Nyhan. No, he didn't commit a gaffe. He's explaining about them.

4. Oh, how about some Newt-bashing for a change. Ta-Nehisi Coates on Newt and race; Sarah Posner on Newt and religion; Ginger Gibson on Newt and the press; and an interview with Newt's old department chair on Newt as an academic. Common theme: Newt's a fraud! Ah, but you knew that, didn't you?

5. David Dayen has a smart piece in which he points out that a big part of why people are using SNAP (food stamps) is because of...what Newt and the Republicans did when he was Speaker.

6. Smart, too: Andrew Sprung on Obama's foreign policy.

7. Mark Schmidt is absolutely right that liberals would be foolish to focus on a Constitutional amendment to "fix" Citizens United. Of course, regular readers will know that I'm for lots of money in elections -- I'm for partial public financing plus disclosure, or floors, not ceilings. But either way, the Constitutional amendment path isn't going to do anyone any good.

8. Sarah Kliff has a highly useful update on ACA implementation.

9. What Americans get wrong about taxes, from David Leonhardt.

10. What political big shots make on the lecture circuit. Hey, bookers: I'm way cheaper!

11. And an awesome "It Gets Better," but also a sad day: the demise of Lookout Records. This ain't no Mecca, indeed.

Florida Debate

2012-01-23T23:11:00.000-06:00

I have a debate wrap over at Plum Line, mainly pushing the point I've made before that Newt's debate skills are something of a fraud. I thought he did quite poorly tonight.

A couple of other points. Of all the whoppers I've ever heard, Newt's claim that he left the House...I don't have the transcript yet, but as the NYT put it "Mr. Gingrich made it sound as if he left the speakership out of a simple desire to do something else." As I was saying, of all the whoppers I've ever heard, that sure is one. Not that I expect him to say: "well, it was a combination of the ethics charges against me, the open secret that I was carrying on an affair with a member of my staff while impeaching the president for infidelity, and that pretty much everyone in the conference was fed up with my shoddy management skills and dictatorial tendencies." But there are some more plausible sounding answers than the one he gave, surely.

The other point is about the debate. During the first half hour, all of us on the twitter machine were bashing Brian Williams for asking only political and gotcha questions, which he did to the extent of twice interrupting a Newt/Mitt policy discussion to urge them to return to personal attacks (yes, really). Then they went to a break, and came back focused almost exclusively on policy questions until the end, when Williams asked an open-ended question that allowed everyone to make a final statement. About 15 minutes or so into the policy portion, the reporters and others I follow on twitter started complaining how boring it all was. My feeling? I'm for the policy questions. Sure, they're dull for those of us who have watched over a dozen debates, plus stump speeches and TV hits and the rest of it. But part of the point of having debates, presumably, is for regular citizens, and while most of them probably changed the channel after the fireworks, a good number of them presumably stuck around and heard all that stuff for the first time from this field.

Indeed, while I'd be fine with leaving the political and gotcha questions out altogether (the candidates will find ways to get their prepared attacks in regardless of what the moderators do), I'm mostly fine with the way that NBC handled their job tonight.

And that's all until the next debate, on Thursday. Yikes!

Catch of the Day

2012-01-23T15:36:00.000-06:00

Here's one for Daniel Larison, who ridicules Ross Douthat's foolish albeit somewhat tentative embrace of the Late Entrant fantasy. Good fun.

Douthat's post, and one from Aaron Blake here also claiming that Mitch Daniels would have been a strong candidate, just make no sense to me at all. The candidates who could have saved the GOP from their current situation would hardly be those, as Blake touts Daniels as being, who can be "the adult in the room." C'mon, folks, you can do better than that. If Republicans were looking for an adult in the room type, they would be perfectly happy with Mitt Romney right now. Don't think the Mittster looks like a grown up these days? Of course not; no candidate ever does when brutally attacked by politicians from his or her party, and losing primaries.

What Republicans could have used both this cycle and last is a candidate who raised no suspicion from any important party faction and also had conventional credentials. Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, and perhaps Fred Thompson all came close, but none of them really achieved that. Given the GOP's wild pivots on so many issues over the last decade, perhaps no one can, and someone like Romney -- who holds orthodox views on all issues right now, but hasn't for long enough to build long-term trust -- is the best they can do. But at any rate, it's hard to see Daniels (or Christie, or Ryan) fitting the bill. He's just not different enough from Romney. Might have been a better candidate, but he wouldn't square the circle.

Anyway: nice catch!

Plum Line: Looking to Florida

2012-01-23T12:39:00.000-06:00

Over at Plum Line, I talk about the factors to look for in Florida. I'll just underline one, perhaps less obvious one, over here...I'm not making any predictions, but it among the possibilities that wouldn't really surprise me would be Santorum winding up benefiting from a Newt/Mitt slugfest. We've seen this happen before -- two heavyweights run a vicious negative campaign against each other, and a third candidate goes positive and winds up defeating both of them. If I was advising the Santorum campaign, that's what I'd urge him to do in the debates tonight and Thursday -- and indeed, he seems to be moving in that direction.

Of course, there's no guarantee that Santorum's candidacy even makes it to next Tuesday. As I ask over there, it's not clear whether anti-Newt party actors would prefer that Santorum drop and endorse Romney (which would presumably tend to help Mitt among social conservatives who haven't trusted him) or, on the other hand, stay in to give the party an emergency candidate to turn to if Romney melts down entirely in Florida. Nor do we know how open Santorum might be to listening to them; in particular, it's not clear he'd want to line up behind Romney if he did drop out. At any rate, that's one of the big things I'm looking for in the debate tonight.

Newt and the Nomination Process

2012-01-23T11:03:00.000-06:00

I recommend excellent posts from both Seth Masket and Nate Sliver over the weekend asking whether a Newt Gingrich nomination would shake the scholarly understanding of presidential nominations. I agree with them (and with John Sides, who has an excellent overview post up today): it would.

We have to be careful with this. Silver goes to far when he says that if Newt continues with "a win in Florida, it would suggest that we had been weighing the evidence incorrectly all along." That's too strong. No political scientist argues that the party consensus candidate will win every single primary; indeed, I don't think there's really an argument out there that the party consensus candidate should win the nomination easily. And Mitt Romney, while certainly a solid leader by every measure of party actors that we have, isn't (as Seth points out) nearly as dominant by measures of party actor support as some previous frontrunners have been. So for Romney to have to struggle some is no big deal at all. Even if Florida turns out to be just like South Carolina (solid win for Newt, with Romney a solid second place) I would think that Romney will still be the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. The next month is on much more favorable turf for the Mittster, giving him -- and party actors who strongly prefer him over Gingrich -- plenty of time to retool and kill Newt's campaign off again by the time we get to Super Tuesday in early March.

I'll also point you to a good Hans Noel comment to John's post. Hans notes:

The trouble with “this time it’s different” is that, even if the basic mechanisms are the same, sometimes it’s different. In a probabilistic world, one case is just one case, and should be treated as such...If [party leaders] lose (and I don’t think they will), that’s not proof that they don’t generally control their nomination. It’s evidence that even though they have a lot of influence, sometimes they lose. I think we’d need several contests to go to a Gingrich (or to a Carter) before we’d conclude that everything had changed.

Hans is certainly right in general, but I think in this particular case I'd disagree. Newt Gingrich, from what we know, isn't really similar to a Carter 1976, Hart 1984, or Huckabee 2008. He's more like Hart 1988 or Giuliani 2008 -- someone who party actors, or at least one group of important party actors, strongly oppose. For Rick Santorum to beat Mitt Romney would be one thing; for Newt to do it would be a very strong signal that the way we understand these things -- certainly the way I understand these things -- is wrong.

Now, the question is whether our understanding would be wrong because it was always wrong -- party actors were never as important as we thought -- or because something has changed now about the process. I should add one more possibility: our understanding of the process is correct, but the party itself changed so much that standard measures of accounting for the influence of key party actors don't work any more.

For now, however, the best bet is still that Mitt Romney wins the nomination, and we'll look back and realize that he won it fairly easily -- and especially that we'll look back and agree that Newt Gingrich never had a realistic chance of being nominated. That's still my analysis for now, and probably will be almost regardless of what happens in Florida. I do want to be open to evidence that "this time is different," but so far at least I'm not really seeing any.

Sunday Question for Liberals

2012-01-22T13:37:00.000-06:00

What issue do you want Barack Obama to mention in the State of the Union speech? I'm not talking about broad themes here or rhetoric, but specific public policy positions that would imply action by the administration. In particular, I'm looking for things that the administration supports, or at least presumably supports, but may or may not take action on -- one of the big functions of the SOTU is to force the WH to choose its priorities.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

2012-01-22T12:40:00.000-06:00

Newt? Really? Y'all know that he's not, you know, a reliable conservative, right?

(I don't mean that he's not a Burkean conservative, which he obviously isn't, but that's not relevant here; I mean he's not a reliable conservative by current movement conservative standards).

What Mattered This Week?

2012-01-22T10:54:00.000-06:00

I'm a bit behind, but it's not too late for What Mattered This Week?

Start with Syria, still. What about the government developments in Pakistan?

I suppose I should include the South Carolina primary. Talked about that one already.

In policy, we had the demise of SOPA/PIPA. I'm inclined to believe that the hype about the future of lobbying and all that is dramatically overdone, but that the policy decision is important. Open to arguments to the contrary on either. Also, the Keystone decision, for now at least, and the contraceptive coverage decision.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Plum Line: South Carolina Wrap

2012-01-21T22:18:00.000-06:00

My South Carolina wrap is up at Plum Line -- as you might guess, I don't think Newt is going to be the nominee.

Not much else to add here right now. I suppose I can add that if I'm wrong (and of course that's always very possible), we'll see Republicans who savaged him in December keep quiet this time, and perhaps at least a handful of heavyweight endorsements. My guess is we won't see that, however. It's not just that they don't want him as their nominee, although that's true too most likely; it's also that they don't believe he can win it when Mitt Romney unloads on him. The expectation is that he'll collapse, just as he did when Romney (and Ron Paul, and the rest) unloaded on him in Iowa. Seriously, it's just really hard to grasp how many vulnerabilities he has, on both issues and personal stuff.

By the way, as long as I'm here..."What Matters" will be up tomorrow, a bit late, but before Sunday questions. Sorry about that; the day got away from me a bit.

South Carolina Primary Day

2012-01-21T11:14:00.000-06:00

Election day!

While some caution is always in order, it sure looks as if it'll be a good day for Newt Gingrich. Which would have consequences: Mitt Romney won't be able to act as if he's the nominee for some time now, probably not until after Super Tuesday in March.

But there's a lot of overreaction going on, too. As Nate Silver noted on twitter (sorry, didn't save the link), Romney's InTrade odds have dropped dramatically this week, from over 90% to a current 68%. That's almost certainly far too low, but it's also not unusual at all for conventional wisdom to fall into a panic whenever an almost-certain nominee loses a primary. Most of the time, however, it doesn't mean anything. Here's a little review for you:

In 2008, John McCain lost 19 states.

In 2000, George W. Bush lost 7 states.

In 1996, Bob Dole lost 6 states.

In 1988, George H. W. Bush lost 9 states.

And in 1980, Ronald Reagan lost 6 states.

Of course, none of this means that Romney will win (all of the losers those years lost lots of primaries, too!). It's just that losing a couple of states, in and of itself, doesn't mean that he's not going to get the nomination, doesn't mean that it will be seen after the fact as a particularly difficult struggle for the nomination, and certainly doesn't mean that he'll be a weak nominee if he does win. And, yes, people had just as large overreactions when Reagan and George H. W. Bush lost Iowa and when W. lost New Hampshire (although the 1988 race was in fact probably still very much up in the air at that point). My own sense at the beginning of the week was that a Mitt/Newt race is pretty much a lock for Romney, and I don't see any reason to change my mind about that after a very good week for Gingrich.

Friday Baseball Post

2012-01-21T02:01:00.000-06:00

So we're in this weird pause for starting pitchers and career wins, with the top active pitcher having only 200 wins (that's Tim Wakefield, who isn't going to add to that very much). I haven't seen it, but I'm sure there are plenty of people saying that the 300 game winner is extinct.

Here's the funny part. 200 wins is, it turns out, the lowest ever for an active leader in wins. Any guesses about what year had the previous record? Turns out it's 1968. Don Drysdale, with 204. It's a serious dry spell; from 1967 through 1977, the leading guy never got past 253. And yet we completely think of that era as a good one for 300 game winners: Carlton, Ryan, Sutton, Niekro, Perry, and Seaver were all pitching then. People have been saying that 300 game winners were going extinct as long as I remember, and yet it still hasn't happened, and I'm confident that it still isn't happening (okay, sorry for being lazy

Roy Halliday is 112 games away, and just finished his 34 year old season. Let's see...he gets 15 a year for four more years and he'll be 52 away through age 38, which would leave him in excellent shape, although of course with pitches...well, at any rate, there's a Favorite Toy calculator over at ESPN, and it gives Halliday a 17% shot. Tim Hudson has a bit more to do and one fewer year...tough, but not impossible. CC Sabathia is in as good shape as you can be at this point, with the Favorite Toy saying 45%. Even someone such as Josh Beckett (125 wins, was 31) isn't as far off the mark as you might thing. Of course, most similar guys don't come close and he probably won't, but would it really shock you if Beckett averaged 18 wins over the next three years? If he does that, he's all of a sudden just a bit behind where Halliday is now.

My guess is that there are three to five active pitchers who will hit 300 wins, and I'll be shocked if there isn't at least one.

...and looking around before I finished this, I came across a John Dewan article from November making basically the same point, except for the Drysdale thing, but with much better calculations on the Favorite Toy. So ignore my calculations above (sorry, too lazy to remove them), and look at his table.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-20T15:46:00.000-06:00

One great sequence of last night's highly entertaining debate was the effort by Rick Santorum to bash Mitt Romney's health care initiative in Massachusetts -- and Romney's defense.

Santorum's attack:

When he was governor of Massachusetts, he put forth Romneycare, which was not a bottom-up free market system. It was a government-run health care system that was the basis of Obamacare, and it has been an abject failure. And he has stood by it.

And Romney's defense:

First of all, the system and my state is not a government-run system. Ninety-two percent of the people had their own insurance before the system was put in place and nothing changed for them. They still had the same private insurance. And the 8 percent of the uninsured, they brought private insurance, not government insurance.

Which, as Adam Serwer points out, is absolutely true -- but of course all of what Romney said is also true for ACA, as well. As Serwer says, "If Obamacare is socialism, then so is Romneycare. And if Romneycare is the distilled essence of free market capitalism, then Obamacare is, too."

He goes on to make some very good points about Republican commitment to markets, or lack thereof. Excellent post.

What I'd add are two things. One is that this is further evidence for my old point that Republican hate Obamacare but don't particularly have any problem with the ACA. That is, they hate whatever they think the Democrats passed last year, but don't in fact have anything against the particular programs that are in the actual law.

The other is that by fully committing to the Ryan budget, Romney was also endorsed the Medicare cuts that are his main point of attack against "Obamacare," since those cuts were in the Ryan budget. Not to mention, as many have pointed out, plenty of other cuts to Medicare and elsewhere that Romney might not want to defend against Barack Obama.

Getting back to Serwer's point: Great catch!

One More Time: It's Way Too Late for "Someone Else"

2012-01-20T13:09:00.000-06:00

Oh, c'mon already! NBC's First Read (via Political Wire):

Romney’s fundamental problem is this: He’s been unable so far to win over conservatives in a conservative state. And if he’s unable to beat Gingrich and Rick Santorum in South Carolina -- both of whom have their shortcomings -- it would send a flashing warning signal to party leaders. What’s more, it would produce chatter, fair or not, that the party needs to find someone else, just as Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is set to deliver the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union on Tuesday night.

Someone else? Ron Fournier started up with this today, too. I guess I need to remind everyone that as of now, filing deadlines have already passed for primaries in states that have about 885 delegates, which is just a bit shy of 40% of all delegates (I think there have been a few changes since the article I was relying on for these numbers was written, but not enough to matter, and they could be in either direction). And counting: another 100 delegates will pass the filing deadline by the end of the month.

It's all just silly. The idea that the frontrunner has to win every single state just doesn't correspond to the 40-year history of the process, and the idea that a couple of good or lousy days in the polls means anything beyond that has been disproved more times than I can count over the last ten months. But, you know, if you think Newt Gingrich can win the nomination, make your case: as little a chance as I think he has, it certainly must be better than anyone who isn't in the fight as of now.

Built For Speed

2012-01-20T12:35:00.000-06:00

Joshua Tucker looks at insta-YouTube videos posted immediately after debates and asks:

It seems to me that there are a number of good papers waiting to be written on these sort of rapid response ads. Most basically, I wonder how many people see them? More generally, though, I wonder how much potential they have to drive media coverage of the event, and to frame the take away point from the debate. (e.g., I found this add through the Politico website in a story on the debate in, actually, a blog entry as opposed to even a featured article.) Can they exacerbate already existing problems for candidates? Finally, I wonder if these rapid response adds posted on YouTube could function as a laboratory to test out which adds are most effective. So you run a bunch of rapid response ads on the internet, see which ones generate the most traction, and then decide which ones to spend your money on in a TV buy. Obviously, there is a much larger question out there about whether ads matter at all , but for now I’m just focusing on the more specific question of the effects of rapid response ads.

I think the proper framework for this is (as Tucker says) how these videos affect the press, and the way to think of them is that they are a major improvement over the old "spin room," in which the candidates' campaigns would interact with the reporters covering the events. But the real innovation here isn't the videos; it's Twitter. The idea of reporters, pundits, and operatives all discussing (if that's the right word) the debate as it's going on, and not just in a press room at the site but around the country, is certainly something new and different.

Here's my question: does this produce more or less pack journalism than the older coverage, which was (presumably) more dependent on that spin room process?

Generally, I'd be interested in knowing how differences in how mainstream conventional wisdom have evolved over the years. In the 1980s and 1990s (and before, but there were fewer televised nomination debates) it seems to me that post-debate analysis on TV, and especially on CNN, was probably a big factor. In the last decade, presumably instantly published blog posts started becoming more influential. Today, you have that, and the in-debate twitter traffic. Can we see different outcomes over these different eras? Are on-the-scene reporters less influential now? Do we get more, or less, of a consensus on who "won" or lost these things, and on what the big moments were (of course, that's where those videos come in, too)? What differences emerge in how all of this plays out in the old neutral press compared to the growing partisan press on both sides?

I agree with Tucker: with any luck, we'll get some very interesting findings about all of this soon. Given that there's a very good chance that the nomination debates had at least significant short-term effects, figuring out how they work seems to be a worthwhile place to do some work.

Will Santorum Drop After South Carolina?

2012-01-20T10:23:00.000-06:00

Right now, Rick Santorum is running fourth in South Carolina as seen by Nate Silver's projection system. It certainly wouldn't be surprising to see a late surge, although I don't see any particular reason to expect one. Would a fourth place finish knock him out? What about third?

In some ways, Santorum has done well since New Hampshire. He's picked up some social conservative endorsements, and had the fun of being declared the official winner of Iowa yesterday, for whatever that's worth. Mitt Romney has had some rough times over the last couple of weeks and may well lose tomorrow. And while Newt Gingrich has very much had an up week, it's pretty limited: he still shows all the vulnerabilities that destroyed his last two surges.

On the other hand...if he finishes dead last in South Carolina after also getting clobbered in New Hampshire, are any potential donors going to be willing to invest in the slim chances that he finds some way to revive his Iowa momentum? It seems unlikely. The problem from Santorum's point of view -- and the reason that winnowing works so efficiently -- is that it very much becomes a self-fulfilling logic, in which Santorum has no chance in Florida because no one thinks he has a chance in Florida and so Santorum is left without anyone willing to supply the resources it would take to win in Florida. Which is why, by the way, speculation about deadlocked conventions is so silly; once we're down to two candidates plus Ron Paul, you then need a virtual tie between the top two to get to deadlock.

Would a solid third be enough to break that logic? Probably not. Although as we get closer to the marginal cases, what matter is how much of a solid constituency Santorum has (not much of a base, as far as I can see) and also just how much Republicans who control resources dislike each of the other three candidates (ah, there's his opportunity).

So the better he does, and the more the contest overall seems up in the air, the better the chances that he'll stick through Florida. But he almost certainly has to beat his current poll numbers, and probably has to beat them solidly.

South Carolina Debate

2012-01-19T23:21:00.000-06:00

I did a long write-up on the debate over at Plum Line, so I'll mostly just send you there. If you missed it, but enjoy presidential debates in general, I'll recommend this one: started with a bang, and rarely let up.

As I said over there, how it will affect GOP voters in the short run depends mostly on what spin is accepted within the GOP partisan press; there's certainly plenty of great clips to support virtually any interpretation. Beyond that, I'm very curious about how Rick Santorum's attacks, especially his quite vicious and personal attacks on Newt, played to conservative audiences. It played really well to me, and in my view any conservative should buy the idea that Newt absolutely cannot be trusted, but I'll certainly confess that I'm not exactly neutral on that subject.

And I'll also repeat what I said over there about John King: he totally, totally screwed up the "open marriage" question. Probably his best bet was to just leave it alone, but if he really wanted to press it he could have framed it better in lots of different ways. All that said: don't assume that five good minutes from Newt makes the issue go away. Among other things, Jay Leno and the rest of that gang aren't going to lay off just because a partisan crowd fell for a cheap rhetorical trick. Don't forget, too, that his marriage record is only one of Newt's many, many, many vulnerabilities. I wouldn't want to guess how it affects him in South Carolina in the short term, but in the long term very few Republican politicians or operatives really want to spend all summer and fall defending Newt's personal life.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-19T14:16:00.000-06:00

Bill Clinton's critique of Barack Obama includes a complaint that Obama didn't sufficiently explain that bank bailouts for an unfortunate necessity because despite helping the undeserving rich they would also help everyone else. Andrew Sprung notes two instances in which Obama basically made that exact point, one in a 2008 presidential debate and one in an April 2009 speech.

It's just amazing how often it turns out that the president has actually said anything that someone says "the president should have said..." Granted, one can argue that the president didn't repeat it often enough, or didn't say it in a properly high-visibility environment (although a presidential debate is quite visible, in this case!). It's not just this president, or even just presidents; virtually every time I've ever heard someone argue that "Democrats should say..." it's something that I've heard Democratic pols say multiple times (or Republicans; I'm not aware of any partisan split on this).

Nice catch!

Perry Out

2012-01-19T10:49:00.000-06:00

Rick Perry drops out and endorses Newt Gingrich. Reminder: he endorsed Rudy Giuliani last time around.

Presidential nomination politics is fascinating in part because all of the drama that only counts around the margins in most elections really can make a huge difference in nomination politics as it's currently practiced. Candidates and their campaigns really do matter. Campaign events -- the perfect ad, the debate gaffe or great line, the press conference gone awry -- really can make a difference to voters with few cues to use to choose between nearly identical candidates.

Of course, structural things matter too. That's why I thought Rick Perry was a viable contender a year ago, when he was saying he wasn't running; it's why I think he still was viable, despite all the disasters of his campaign, as late as mid-December. As it turned out, it was Rick Santorum who caught the late bounce and "won" Iowa, but it's worth pointing out that Perry wound up only 3500 votes behind Newt Gingrich for 4th place, and only 14K votes behind Ron Paul for third. On the one hand, that's a solid drubbing, no question. But one good ad, or one slightly better and slightly more redeeming debate performance, and it's easy to imagine things working out very differently. Because Perry still had plenty of structural advantages that could have turned a somewhat better finish in Iowa into a very strong campaign down the line.

But it was not to be. Perhaps it was Perry's position on immigration, or even more so the way he talked about it (calling those who opposed him heartless). Perhaps it was just that Republicans couldn't handle the debate performances. Perhaps it was the memory of George W. Bush -- before Perry entered, a lot of pundits (but not me) said that there was no way another Texas governor would be nominated so soon after Bush, and perhaps there was something to that. Perhaps Perry's gaffes would have been excused a little more easily if they didn't remind people, somehow, of what happened the last time Republicans decided that policy knowledge was irrelevant and nominated Bush.

As Buzzfeed is saying, "running for president is hard." Perry was a lot better at it in December and January than he was in the fall, but it was too little, too late.

Tie Goes the Other Way

2012-01-19T08:22:00.001-06:00

So the official numbers from Iowa are finally out, and it's still a tie -- but now it's a tie with Rick Santorum having a few more officially counted votes than Mitt Romney. The Iowa Republican Party, which of course knows that Romney is very likely to be the nominee, has decided against calling it a win for Santorum, and the press is playing along -- the New York Times on its home page right now says "No Official Winner for Iowa Caucuses." Adam Serwer calls it correctly:

Odd that media legs are repeating "tie" spin in Iowa, since the only reason that's being said is to avoid embarrassing the assumed nominee.

And adds that if they called the old results a Romney win, then they should now be talking about a Santorum win. I agree -- although better, in both cases, to call it a tie. Remember, nothing tangible is at stake in the question of who had a few more votes, so I don't see any need for the press to pretend to know more than they actually do. It's a tie.

I think this actually demonstrates that I was correct in saying, before Iowa, that it didn't really matter how the votes fell as long as Romney, Santorum, and Ron Paul were 1-2-3 in some order. What mattered was the spin, especially within the partisan press. And that spin was largely independent of the exact order of finish. As it happened, Santorum seems to have received a lot less positive media attention than some previous strong finishers in Iowa, although I'll be interested to hear of any studies about what Fox News actually looked like in the days after Iowa.

Could things have been different had Santorum had this tiny lead on the night of the caucuses? There's no way to prove it one way or another, but again: lots of second place finishers have received plenty of great press. Some of this may actually have been Santorum's own fault, since he inexplicably waited until most people had gone to bed before giving a victory speech that night. But my assumption is that if GOP party actors really had wanted to derail Mitt Romney that they would have spun the results heavily for Santorum, and as far as I could see that never happened. It's hard to believe they would have acted differently had the tie gone the other way back then.

The Post-Endgame

2012-01-18T17:01:00.000-06:00

Good item from Steve Kornacki (who has been doing great work on GOP WH 2012, which I feel that I haven't linked to enough; you should be reading him) about what's at stake in South Carolina. He's right: if Romney does well there, he'll be in strong enough shape that the party will begin to act as if the nomination has been clinched, which will in turn mean that he can begin his general election campaign. In my view, he'll in fact lock up the nomination even if he loses to Newt Gingrich there, but Newt will be much more of a nuisance for a while if South Carolina goes his way. In particular, Romney would certainly have to campaign in Florida as if the nomination was in doubt -- and there's a good chance that that he'll also have to take Super Tuesday seriously.

We don't really have a name for that phase of the process: the point at which the last serious threat to win the nomination is gone, but others are still campaigning and could even win some states. We probably reached that point in 2000 for George W. Bush after Iowa; I'd argue that Bill Clinton achieved that in New Hampshire in 1992, probably. It may be the case that Romney really hit that by crushing Rick Perry in Iowa this year, but he'll certainly do it in South Carolina if he knocks Perry and Rick Santorum out.

Note that it's also quite possible that a solid Romney win on Saturday leads to a rapid end to every campaign but that of Ron Paul. It wouldn't be a shock if a Romney win is followed rapidly by a ton of endorsements, along with everyone but Paul dropping out by the end of the week. If the polling is even close, Saturday will mark the end of any realistic uncertainty about the Republican nominee. But there still are lots of possible endgames, or maybe the better term is post-endgames; we'll have to see whether Romney has to pretend the nomination is still in doubt or not.

GOP Field Strength, One More Time

2012-01-18T13:17:00.001-06:00

Before we come up with all sorts of theories of why the Republican field was so weak in the 2012 presidential cycle (as Paul Krugman does here or Fred Hiatt does here) or wonder how Mitt Romney would have done against better challengers (as Steve Benen does here), it's just worth remembering that the real GOP field this time was at least Romney, Pawlenty, Perry, and Barbour, and perhaps also several others, including Palin, Thune, Christie, and Daniels. That's the real field that we should consider when assessing what Romney beat. Most of the others who showed up for debates and even took votes in some primaries, such as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, were just sideshows. Whether deliberately planned that way or not, they weren't actually running for the Republican nomination for president; they were seeking publicity for one reason or another. Or, in the case of Ron Paul, seeking to alter the debate within the party on various issues. Or maybe they were fully committed to running but just had no idea of how to do it or what it would take to win. The point is that Romney really had nothing to worry about from any of them.

Once can certainly make the case that the actual group who ran from president in 2009-2011 was relatively weak. I'd say it was similar to several previous groups: the Republican field in 2008, and Democratic fields in 2004, 1992, and perhaps 1988. None of those featured real first-tier heavyweights, and each -- including the GOP 2012 crew -- had a handful of plausible nominees, people who had conventional credentials and were within the mainstream of their parties. As far as why this cycle was similar to those, it's mostly supply, not demand. The only plausibly top-tier heavyweights out there really weren't, since neither Sarah Palin nor (gulp) Dan Quayle really qualify, and there's no one out there similar to Ronald Reagan 1980, someone who was a major party leader for years. As many have pointed out, the next tier down, the solid respectable sitting or recently retired Senators and governors, were wiped out to a large extent by the big Democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008. And so the pool of potential plausible nominees was relatively small, before even starting to worry about anything else at all.

The key point here is that Pawlenty at least, Barbour almost certainly, and at least a few of the others were defeated by Mitt Romney, even if those defeats didn't take place in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina. It's just become the case that Republicans winnow early, but that doesn't mean that the first ones out were actually the weakest candidates or had the smallest chance of winning. And if you stack the 2012 losers against other fields of losers, you're not going to find a huge difference on paper (where Rick Perry looks a lot more impressive, granted, than he turned out to be), and perhaps not even a big difference in fact (since Perry goes with John Glenn, Phil Gramm, John Connally, and other famous flops). It's rare to have a runner-up as strong as Hillary Clinton 2008 or Bob Dole 1988; there are a lot more like John Edwards 2004 or Mike Huckabee 2008 or Bill Bradley 2000 who aren't going to be more impressive than Perry and Pawlenty this time around.

Republicans Have Themselves To Blame For Newt

2012-01-18T09:02:00.001-06:00

Ross Douthat has a very nice item about how Newt Gingrich has helped to spike the chances of a more conservative opponent defeating Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination. I have to wonder about the final paragraph, however (his italics):

Instead, Gingrich reclaimed the spotlight, as only he knows how to do. (Romney’s a looter! Poor kids should work as janitors!) For this, if he wins the election, Romney owes him an ambassadorship, at the very least. And conservatives wondering how a man they so mistrust could be breezing to the nomination should know exactly whom to blame.

Whom to blame? I think he means Newt, but the real answer is: themselves.

After all, by the end of 1998, Newt Gingrich was fully exposed: the ethics problems, of course, but more to the point it was clear he just wasn't a very good politician, at least when it came to governing. Nor was he someone who could be trusted. And his instincts, it had turned out, just weren't very conservative at all. And that's putting aside the marital issues, for whatever they're worth.

And yet Republicans never blinked in rehabilitating him; he was immediately welcomed as a senior statesman and important person within conservative policy and particularly media circles. Just as Oliver North had been, and Gordon Liddy before that. I've talked about this before...the Democrats, for the most part, just don't do this: Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski were hardly ever seen again after leaving office in disgrace.

The caveat is that Democrats are willing to forgive one category of disgraced former official: those who were Republicans but are now willing to turn on their old party (John Dean, David Stockman).

Anyway, Republicans in Washington knew exactly what Newt was, but for over a decade they've chosen to pretend otherwise, either because he was useful to have on TV attacking the Democrats, or just because that's how Republicans do things. So after treating him as a distinguished statesman and brilliant conservative politician for over a decade, despite clearly not believing it (as was shown the second he spiked in the polls in December), they're just getting exactly what they deserve.

Blame the Media, Conservative Dissident Version

2012-01-17T16:46:00.000-06:00

Conor Friedersdorf does conservatives a great service by keeping his eye on the conservative partisan media. But I'm not at all convinced that they're the ones who did in Jon Huntsman, as Friedersdorf would have it.

Here's the question, and it's one for which we don't really know the answer: to what extent does the conservative partisan media -- Rush Limbaugh, Fox News in general and their various hosts in particular, the other conservative talk radio hosts, and conservative web sites -- function independently of the rest of the Republican Party? Keeping in mind that when I say "Republican Party" I mean the expanded party -- both formal party organizations and the larger party network, which includes party-aligned groups and individuals.

I don't think we know the answer overall. But when it comes to Jon Huntsman, it's pretty clear to me at least that Fox News and the rest of them were perfectly in accord with the rest of the party. After all, Huntsman exits the campaign after earning practically no high-visibility endorsements from party actors (I think he managed a few minor ones in New Hampshire, but that's about it). Nor do I expect that he raised a lot of money from the party network. Of course, it's sometimes very difficult to figure out who is influencing who in these things, but in this particular case I don't think it's hard at all: Republicans just weren't interested in what Huntsman was selling. And while Friedersdorf's larger point is that the Republican partisan press influenced the entire environment that candidates must compete within, again I just don't buy the idea that Huntsman, 2012, could have been a major factor in any plausible GOP environment.

Again, however, I think that we just don't know enough about how independent the partisan press is, either individually or as a whole. There's certainly plenty of data being generated during this election cycle; with any luck, we'll know a whole lot more once the people who study this sort of thing report back in a while.

Not a Monday Movie Post

2012-01-17T15:11:00.000-06:00

OK, I've just struggled a lot to get back into the rhythm of doing Monday Movie Posts. I'm not sure whether very many readers care, but I'll try to get back to it. I would blame the GOP debates (which knock out an average of one movie-length time slot a week)...really, I've just been watching other things. I do have a half-finished post about that awful Kelsey Grammer show, so I should finish it one of these weeks. I have another excuse...my DVR died suddenly a couple weeks ago, and with it a couple dozen or so movies I had saved to watch for Monday Movie Posts. But it's not much of an excuse, since TCM keeps showing at least one a week that I could do, and, well, I haven't, yet.

I should get to the point -- if you really want some very brief movies stuff from me, head over to Salon, where they've put together a slideshow of favorite "election entertainment" from various people and they were nice enough to ask me to participate. I don't know that it's really my favorite as such, but I picked "The Great McGinty" and also mentioned "Hail the Conquering Hero" -- both are movies I've highly recommended here in the past. Take a look at what others picked. I'm very skeptical of "Primary Colors" (the movie), although I've never seen it or read the book, so I could be wrong and I'm not a huge fan of "The Best Man," but other than that there are lots of good picks to check out. Might as well open it up to everyone: I was asked to "name [my] favorite election- or campaign-related movie, novel, or TV show." Got one?

Big Bills Take Time

2012-01-17T14:10:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum makes several good points here and I agree with his main point, and I hope to get to the general topic later...but he ran into one of my pet peeves and so I'm all about the rapid response on this one. It's just not true that ACA took a lot longer than it needed to.

Drum:

Why did healthcare reform take so long? Not because of any clever strategy on Obama's part. It was because, right or wrong, he made a rational calculation not to repeat Bill Clinton's mistakes. So instead of pushing a plan of his own, he let Congress take the lead. And Congress decided to move very, very slowly.

It's true that Congress moved slowly, and it's true that Obama didn't take the lead, at least in terms of preparing a fully formed bill to drop in the hopper (although the bill basically followed the outline of his campaign plan, and the White House was highly involved every step of the way). And it's even true that Congress could have moved slightly quicker in 2009 -- and that it's vaguely possible that they could have finished a reconciled bill in late December, instead of only getting ready for conference at that point.

But mostly, the bill took time because moving major legislation takes a lot of time, and this was one huge piece of legislation. It was going to take time to write the bill, to mark up the bill, to form coalitions, to cut deals...all that had to happen, and there just wasn't much choice in the matter. What's more, Republicans were insisting, and had the procedural precedents to do so, in dragging things out as long as possible.

Congress can move very quickly when it wants to (TARP, for example, came to the floor with no delays at all, and only a floor defeat slowed it up a bit). Given that ACA was going to get at least near-unanimous opposition from Republicans and that they would use more or less every possible procedural mechanism available to them to slow it down, there was just no way that it was going to be resolved in fewer than eight or nine months.

The one piece of legislation that I think Obama and the Democrats might have moved very quickly was Dodd-Frank. I can imagine a choice to work out a bill during November and December 2008, a successful GOP buy-in of at least half a dozen Senators, and then an accelerated 1933-style process parallel to the stimulus bill or even before that one. It's possible that in the depths of the recession and the very first days of the Obama presidency that a fair number of Republicans might -- might! -- have chosen cooperation over confrontation on the banking issue. But health care? That was always going to be a fierce partisan fight, and therefore it was going to take time. No matter who was in the Oval Office.

Yeah, Newt's Debate Skill is a Fraud, Too

2012-01-17T12:44:00.000-06:00

Newt Gingrich generally got good reviews for his debate performance last night. It may revive one of the things we heard about a lot during the Newt surge of December: that Republicans liked the idea of nominating him because they thought he'd destroy Barack Obama in the fall debates. Now, the idea that presidential (general) elections hinge on debates is a fantasy anyway (one that Ross Douthat was good on back when Newt was on top partially because of belief in just fantasies). But would Newt actually be good at the fall debates?

No, he probably wouldn't be. Newt's strong suit last night was an extended debate with Juan Williams, in which the former Speaker cleverly enlisted the audience on his side. Which reminded me: virtually every one of Newt's great debate moments all year have been exactly like that. Usually at the expense of a moderator, Newt fires off a one-liner that is perfectly in tune with GOP live debate audiences...you know, the audiences that have jeered the Golden Rule and cheered executions.

You know which debates were tough for Newt? As it happened, there were a string of debates in December, just around the time that he was leading in the polls, that did not feature heavily miked partisan audiences. And Newt didn't do well without them. Nor did he handle attacks all that well. Meanwhile, when he was running a hard negative campaign against Mitt Romney outside the debate hall, he went all Pawlenty on the big stage, especially in a New Hampshire debate earlier this month when he was just rolling out his attacks. Indeed, one of Newt's tricks in early debates that played quite well with the GOP electorate was praising each of his rivals on stage and urging everyone to play nice and concentrate on the big goal of taking down Obama. That's a smart debate trick for an also-ran in a big primary field, but it isn't what Republicans want in a general election debate. For that matter, in the two one-on-one debates Newt arranged (with Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman) he basically praised or ignored his on-stage opponent.

Again, this is mostly theater review rather than political analysis, given that Newt isn't going to be the nominee and that debates don't make much of a difference anyway. But it's always fun to make the point whenever it comes up: he's a pretty good snake oil salesman, but otherwise the guy is a total fraud.

Mitt Romney, Tea Party Candidate

2012-01-17T10:34:00.000-06:00

I wrote over at Greg's place yesterday that one reason social conservatives haven't opposed Mitt Romney effectively might be that they don't really mind if he wins; after all, there's no actual separation on social conservative issues between where Romney says he is and where the other candidates are. Jonathan Cohn made the case yesterday that on fiscal issues Romney is actually quite radical, and Ezra Klein notes that Romney is far to the right of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign.

Indeed, as far as I can tell there's virtually no separation between Romney and the other candidates on core conservative issues. The main "problem" with Romney from their point of view is not his current professed positions; it's whether he can be trusted, given his record in Massachusetts (including both his time as governor and his two campaigns). Note that every attack against him (health care, abortion, his business record) from primary opponents has been about his past, not his current positions. And it's probably a plus for him that whatever his past, he's stuck with his current issue positions (except, perhaps, where the party as a whole has shifted) through two presidential cycles. It doesn't guarantee he'll be loyal in office, but it presumably can't hurt.

This helps explain why the supposed "anti-Romney" vote never really existed, at least to any large extent; it was always a "not enthusiastic about Romney" group (and see John Sides and Lynn Vavreck for confirming data).

Which doesn't mean that Romney was never vulnerable. I think he was. But it does explain why he wasn't immediately toppled by a Tea Party candidate. Team Romney made sure from the start that there just wouldn't be any issue on which a Tea Party candidate could find any separation in their current positions. It appears that it worked at the group level: no key Republican groups really tried hard to veto Romney. And that probably was enough for him to win the nomination fairly easily.

South Carolina Debate

2012-01-16T22:57:00.000-06:00

My wrap on the South Carolina debate is up at Plum Line. My bottom line: the other four gave it a good fifteen minutes or so of actually hitting Romney, got him flustered a bit..and then quit for the night after the first commercial break.

Just a few things to tack on to what I said over there...Ron Paul must have had his worst debate night ever. He's usually completely solid at it, but he was off his game. Perhaps because for the first time I recall in two cycles of these things, this was the first time that the audience was decidedly anti-Paul. He had a few supporters there, but it sure sounded like a Perry/Newt crowd to me. I don't know; maybe Paul was the same as always, but my perception was affected by the crowd.

As far as the rest of it: all three of the supposed conservative alternatives had good nights, but Newt probably had the best, at least for a South Carolina Republican electorate -- he got into an elongated debate with Juan Williams about whether Newt was a horrible racist for various things he's said, and of course the audience and presumably GOP voters everywhere were very much on Newt's side on that question. No, Williams didn't actually say that Newt was a racist, but anything allowing Republicans to go for the resentment is a big win. Speaking of which: Newt is really the only one of them who even passably does resentment, and that's not really his big thing, either. Rick Perry does the issue positions and topics of resentment, but he's more of a Texas cartoon character than he is a resentment-filled Southerner. All of which makes me think that if Sarah Palin had been willing to even slightly play by the normal rules of politics she would have been a formidable candidate.

At any rate, I've been saying all week that it's over unless Santorum (or Perry, but that's really not likely) can at least come very close to beating Romney. And I didn't see anything tonight that even hinted that's going to happen; if anything, Newt's solid night made it even less likely. And Newt can beat Romney all he likes in South Carolina, but he's never going to be the nominee.

More on the Future of the Public Option

2012-01-16T15:29:00.000-06:00

David Dayen has an interesting response to my post from last week about the future of the public option, in which I noted that it's very early, but so far there doesn't seem to be much visible support for adding a health insurance public option to ACA among 2012 Democratic Senate candidates.

Dayen argues that the public option fight "fundamentally transformed the tactics and strategies of whatever is left of a progressive movement." He continues:

[T]he trust of the base to use the normal mechanisms of politics to advance goals simply crumbled. That’s why you’re seeing a dearth of promises from candidates about the public option. Base voters have become increasingly cynical that those promises mean anything. So why bother making the promise in the first place? The progressive movement is undergoing a transformation where they no longer see engagement with candidates as the best or only strategy to advance goals. Those not hopelessly alienated by the entire political process prefer outsider strategies that force political pressure from the bottom up, rather than relying on the promises of those politicians to carry the day. That’s the new reality...

Is Dayen right about what "the progressive movement" believes? I don't know. It's easy to forget that most liberals supported ACA and support Barack Obama, but I'm not aware of any solid evidence about what activists believe or how they're acting. I'm sure he's correct about some, but I have no idea how significant that is in practice.

If he's right, however, than that's too bad for liberals, and it's a fundamental misreading of the 2009-2010 ACA battle. After all, the truth back then was that Democratic candidates in 2008, and certainly Barack Obama, placed very little emphasis on the public option as a key campaign promise. It was certainly mentioned, but it was presented as a minor component during the campaign. So in view, it's a major misreading of the ACA fight to read it as showing that liberal politicians can't be trusted to keep their promises. Instead, what ACA showed that promises matter a lot, but that there's a lot of complexity involved -- higher profile promises matter more than those on which the candidate places less emphasis, and sometimes it's Members of Congress who matter as much or more than the president.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that political action outside of basic electoral politics is pointless. My general guess is that people gravitate and should gravitate to where they're most comfortable. But in purely instrumental terms, one of the best investments that I can think of in politics is in getting politicians who want to be seen as sympathetic to your point of view to actually support the issues you care most about.

My prediction had been that activists would make it clear to liberal candidates that the public option was now a high priority, which would translate into quick action whenever the next chance happens for fulfilling the liberal agenda (just as family leave passed quickly in 1993 and the Lilly Ledbetter Act passed quickly in 2009. For liberals to react to ACA passage instead as fundamentally a betrayal would be a mistake; for them to react by giving up on forcing politicians to make future promises would basically be an excellent way for liberals to lose all influence in Washington.

Huntsman Out

2012-01-16T11:11:00.002-06:00

Jon Huntsman is out, and endorsing Mitt Romney. There's no real effect on the race here, because this is a thoroughly expected development; the weird thing would have been if Huntsman had tried to continue on after getting 5% or less in South Carolina.

I'd made the point before that Huntsman reminded me of Bruce Babbitt 1988 -- both were loved by the press, respected but not supported by party actors, and ignored by voters. Both attempted the Big Campaign Strategy of being funny in debates, despite neither actually displaying any actual comic ability at all. But Huntsman also reminds me of someone like Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, Arlen Specter, or Paul Laxalt, people who seemed to sort of have the right qualifications on paper but in fact were just totally out of their league as presidential candidates, at least the way they were going about doing it. More than one person has speculated that Huntsman's campaign was more than anything a consultant-driven enterprise, and while it's always hard to tell from the outside, that fits perfectly with everything I've seen. But it also fits the profile of a politician who has always succeeded at lower levels and just completely misunderstood the gap between a statewide election in Utah and a national campaign.

At any rate, you don't get a party's nomination by deliberately annoying most of the party's groups.

My other comment here is that I'm kicking myself for not rewriting and updating the post I wrote about how just because Rick Perry said on the day after Iowa that he was staying in through South Carolina didn't necessarily mean that he was really going to stay in through Iowa. As it happened, Perry did stick around (at least so far), but similar claims by Huntsman immediately after New Hampshire turned out to be phony. Not that there's anything wrong with them doing so, but it's only natural that candidates will claim that they're in it for good right up until the point that they fold, and so observers should give very minimal value to any such claim.

Catch of the Day/Housekeeping

2012-01-16T09:03:00.000-06:00

A catch of the day to Greg Sargent, who caught CNN's Candy Crowley repeating Mitt Romney's claim about job losses during Barack Obama's presidency. Crowley, following Romney, treats it as a "fact" that employment has shrunk by 1.7 million jobs, but as Greg has been pointing out the overwhelming bulk of job losses were in the first couple months of the administration. Indeed, a not-insignificant portion of the job losses in Romney's, and Crowley's, calculation took place in the first twenty days of January 2009, before Obama had even taken office. Steve Benen adds more detail, pointing out that after the first six months of 2009 the economy has added jobs, not lost them, and surely it's highly misleading to include at the very least the first two or three months of 2009 against Obama's record.

Romney, and Crowley, certainly have plenty of reasonable ground to attack Obama's jobs record. But that particular statistic is misleading at best, and Greg is right that Crowley shouldn't be using it. Great catch!

Meanwhile, Happy King Day to everyone. Speaking of Greg -- he's taking the day off, which means that I'll be over at Plum Line all day, including a debate wrap tonight (yup, they're at it again). I'll be posting here as well, at least a bit, but I probably won't link to each individual Plum Line post during the day. Enjoy the holiday!

Sunday Question for Liberals

2012-01-15T14:42:00.000-06:00

What has surprised you about the Republican presidential nomination battle? Anything? Do you think you've learned anything about the Republican Party that you didn't know earlier?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

2012-01-15T13:37:00.000-06:00

During the current nomination fight, is there any public policy issue that you wish the candidates were discussing more?

What Mattered This Week?

2012-01-14T14:25:00.000-06:00

Starting with the usual...the economy in Europe. And Syria.

I'm not sure about the various stories about Iran this week. Lots going on, not clear to me at least how much of it matters.

The New Hampshire primary wasn't exactly full of surprises, but Mitt Romney had a very good week as far as the nomination is concerned. On the other hand, he took some general election hits...on balance, my sense is that Romney in the general election is basically going to be Generic Republican Candidate, however.

I really haven't been following the privacy bill (SOPA) developments closely -- mostly just tweets from various people who care about the issue -- but if you believe that's an important fight, it seemed to have taken a major turn (against the bill) this week.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Friday Baseball Post

2012-01-13T23:51:00.000-06:00

This I did not know: Dan Okrent, who knows a thing or two about designing games, has the same basic attitude towards structuring the divisions/postseason that I have:

If you’re going to have divisions in baseball, and I can see a case for it, then the team with the best record in the league should get more than the home field advantage. So it would be like, in a seven-game series, the pennant-winning team would have to win three games before the other team wins four. You get these races that aren’t races, and I would change that tomorrow.

I'd love to hear what he thinks of my preferred plan (two divisions per league, first place team plays the other division's second place team and needs to win one fewer game). As far as I'm concerned, MLB could do a lot worse than putting Okrent in charge of this stuff. I'd trust him.

In other news...I'm happy that Rock Raines moved up to close to 50%. I'm a lot more confident now that he'll eventually get in. I'm not confident about Alan Trammell yet, but it was a solid step in the right direction for him, too. On the down side, it's also pretty clear now that Jack Morris will be a Hall of Famer, sooner or later. With the crazy balloting that's about to happen, there's really no way to guess when that will be, but no one gets that close and then doesn't get in. Too bad; there's no way that he's deserving.

Meanwhile, McGwire and Palmiero are just as flat as ever. It's hard to believe that Bonds and Clemens do worse than those guys (are there really people voting for McGwire who won't vote for Bonds and Clemens? I suppose anything is possible, but it's hard to see). I do think that there seem to be a chunk of voters who believe that McGwire isn't actually qualified based only on his playing career, and then there are others who believe that McGwire, and certainly Palmeiro, were marginal HOFers and wouldn't have made it without "cheating." They'll presumably treat Sammy Sosa the same way, right? But I've never heard anyone say that about Bonds and Clemens...there's also what I consider to be an entirely insane belief among sportswriters that we know exactly and certainly when Barry Bonds started using steroids, and I've heard more than one of them talk about how he had earned a HOF spot during his "clean" career. The funniest thing would be if he got in from that kind of thinking, and then it turned out he's been taking steroids since college.

Anyway, I definitely don't expect Bonds or Clemens to get in next year, but I wouldn't be shocked if they're both closer to 50% and then improve from that point. Or, you know, they could each get 7% and get knocked off the ballot...surely there are a whole lot of sportswriters who want to punish them. I guess we'll just have to wait a year to know.

Read Stuff, You Should

2012-01-13T17:30:00.000-06:00

My Plum Line post today was about House Republicans, so check that out if you're interested. But I also have lots of good stuff for your long weekend:

1. At the new Vanderbilt blog, John Geer argues that Newt's Iowa collapse was probably the work of elite GOP opinion, not attack ads. Also, Josh Putnam responds to my question about Republicans and New Hampshire, and Jordan Ragusa thinks about South Carolina and candidate incentives.

2. E.J. Graff on rape statistics and why getting it right matters.

3. The recent Defense Authorization bill was apparently more complex than it appeared; Adam Serwer is on it.

4. Some hashtag archeology, from Nancy Scola; sort of odd that @dbernstein and @Graniteprof didn't rate a mention.

5. Speaking of which, David S. Bernstein on how the press corps on the campaign trail has changed, and Meryl Gordon on progress -- and lack of progress -- in gender equality.

6. Parties matter. Matt Yglesias explains why that helps anticipate a possible Mitt Romney presidency. Michael Cohen looks at Romney and the other candidates on foreign policy, and Conor Friedersdorf follows Sarah Palin's theories about Romney and the press. Nate Silver argues that the Bain attacks could hurt Romney in November, and explains how. Good post.

7. Brad DeLong explains why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a bad idea.

8. I definitely agree with Andrew Rudalevige, who throws some history and cold water on Barack Obama's ideas for government reorganization.

9. No JSTOR for you! Alexis Madrigal has the numbers, and why it matters.

10. Kevin Drum, king of all media.

11. Pictures of old Washington. The part people live in.

12. And two baseball links: Christina Kahrl is terrific as usual on Jack Morris, HOF candidate; BP's Colin Wyers is good on myths, images, and steroids.

Enjoy!

Future of Public Option Update

2012-01-13T14:21:00.002-06:00

Have liberals forgotten about the public option?

Supporters of health care reform are on the defensive these days; if Republicans sweep the 2012 elections, liberals will be hard-pressed to prevent a complete repeal of ACA. But what if Democrats win a solid victory in 2012, sending Barack Obama back to the White House, returning a Democratic majority to the House, and picking up a couple of seats in the Senate? What would be the health care agenda then? Would the Democrats go back and finish what they had started by reviving and passing a public option on health care?

It’s still very early, but the first hints are a lot less promising than I would have expected for public option supporters. I checked the web sites of non-incumbent Democrats running for the Senate with decent chances of winning this year: those running in open seats and weak Republican seats in Nevada and Massachusetts. Of the seven candidates in six states that I looked at who had issue positions listed (a few still have only placeholder or minimal sites so far), none of them mentioned a public option. None. Two mentioned drug reimportation; two didn’t mention health care at all.

The truth is that in the case of Democratic landslide, adding a public option would actually be quite possible – and a lot easier than it would have been back in 2009. That’s because unlike the full ACA back then, a public option would almost certainly be possible to include in a reconciliation bill, which would need only a simple majority in the Senate. On top of that, the public option (as liberals pointed out nonstop back then) has always polled extremely well. Granted, the Supreme Court decision could throw everything off-kilter, and there’s no guarantee at all that Democrats will win big in November. But if they do, it’s actually not that hard to pass – if it’s a campaign priority for those Democrats who win.

As I said, it’s very early, and most of these candidates have fairly slim issue sections on their web pages. But of course that’s when it’s easiest to influence them. Hey, liberals! You want a public option on health insurance? Make it a mandatory position for Democrats running for Congress, and sooner or later the Dems will have a good year and they’ll pass it. Or, if you forget about it now, odds are it will never be passed.

Ignore Those Polls!

2012-01-13T09:18:00.000-06:00

There's a Pew poll out this morning about endorsements, in which Republican voters are asked how an endorsement by a variety of people would affect their vote. Ignore those polls! We (humans, that is) are really, really bad at determining why we voted for a candidate; we're almost certainly even worse at hypotheticals about how some new piece of information would affect our vote.

That's not just true of endorsements; it's true of any new piece of information. Ask people whether they're more likely to vote for Barack Obama if the economy improves, and their answers are going to be less meaningful than examining past examples of the relationship between the economy and actual voting behavior -- because we're just not very good at predicting these sorts of things. And we have biases. For example, we know that given a two-party election about 80% of us are absolutely locked in by our partisan inclinations, but very large numbers of those locked-in voters will tell you they vote the candidate, and not the party.

There is information in the Pew poll; it can be taken as an indication of how popular the various people they test are with Republicans. But of course it's easier to get at that with a straight favorability question. I'm not convinced that asking it this way adds any value at all.

Plum Line: Endorsement Update

2012-01-12T17:01:00.000-06:00

Over at Plum Line today, I did an update on various different endorsement counts in the WH GOP 2012 race. As you probably know, the answer is that Mitt Romney is getting very close to putting this thing away. More at the link.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the possibility that Newt Gingrich might win South Carolina, leading to a press frenzy around the "collapsing" Romney just as I call him the certain nominee. Oh well; it's just as likely he'll win South Carolina by ten points, and we'll get ready for a ten month long general election campaign. Doesn't that sound like fun?

The OLC Recess Appointment Opinion

2012-01-12T15:46:00.000-06:00

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, as I've noted all day, released its opinion on recess appointments and pro forma Senate sessions today. The bottom line: in their opinion, the pro forma gimmick is illegitimate, and the president is free to choose to ignore those sessions and treat periods such as the current one as proper, Constitution-qualifying recesses for the purpose of recess appointments.

First, the substantive implications. OLC basically leaves alone the old three-day minimum; the point here is that situations such as the present one are in fact long (enough) recesses, notwithstanding the pro forma sessions. This opinion does not, as I see it, put the presidency on the path to making recess appointments when the Senate breaks for lunch, or overnight or on weekends. Second, it opposes any use of pro forma sessions to create phony recesses -- while OLC does note that during the current Congress the gimmick has been forced by the House, there's nothing here to hold back a future president faced with the situation that George W. Bush faced (and accepted) in 2007-2008. In my view it would have been sensible to distinguish between a Senate-supported pro forma gimmick and one forced by the House against the preferences of the Senate majority, but there's no support for that view here.

Second, the strength of the opinion. Basically, OLC says that this is a new question (the tactic never really showed up before 2007), that there's very little Constitutional guidance, and that consequently the call could basically go either way, although they argue that the pro-appointment side has the better of it. For a good analysis of this part of it, see Bush-era recess appointment supporter John Ellwood.

Third, while it's true as Matt Glassman points out that an OLC opinion has no force of law and is to be expected to take the point of view of the executive branch, I'd caution against interpreting this purely as a case of the president overriding Congress's claim that they are in recess. Congress per se has made no such claim, and OLC relies not just on previous Justice Department opinions but in several places on what Congress itself has said over the years.

Fourth, ultimately, however, the decision rests (as Adam Serwer says) on the claim that the practical reality of a Congress out of town and in fact not dealing with appointments trumps the claim that Congress is technically still in session during such periods.

My general feeling about this remains the same. I strongly support a meaningful advise-and-consent role for the Senate in the nominations process; in fact, I mostly oppose some of the "streamlining" reform efforts to move large numbers of executive branch positions out of the category of nominations that need confirmation. However, I don't think that recess appointments are much of a threat to the Senate's role. As a presidential weapon, they lack punch. On judicial nominations, recess appointments are massive surrenders for the president since they involve trading a lifetime slot for a short-term one. And even in the executive branch, recess appointments have real disadvantages over regular confirmed nominations. Recess appointments at best are a weapon for presidents to use in negotiating with the Senate, not a potential replacement for it.

And as for the specific question...again, as a non-lawyer, my sense is that it's a close call if the majority of the Senate insists that they are not in recess while the president believes that they are for all practical purposes, but that it's a much less close case when the majority of the Senate agrees with the president and only the House (and the Senate minority) disagree.

Of course, there is something that the president and the majority of the Senate could do other than recess appointments: they could reform the Senate to allow for majority confirmation of executive branch nominees.

Obama's Botched Recess Appointment Process

2012-01-12T14:02:00.000-06:00

The Justice Department opinion supporting Barack Obama's recent recess appointments is out. I'll comment on the substance of it a bit later (I think it's fine), but first, a word on procedure. On the good side, it's very good that the opinion was publicly released. However, overall the administration, in my view, thoroughly botched the politics of this, and I wanted to get all of this out in a separate post from my comments on the

As several have already noted, the opinion is dated January 6, which is two days after the appointments were made, although the opinion states that it is only formalizing the informal guidance it gave to the White House prior to the appointments. Fine; as a non-lawyer, I have no particular expertise on the legal implications of all that. Politically, however, it seems quite stupid. It makes the whole process look shady and the opinion jury-rigged. And why? It's not as if the issues were developing quickly. Nor did anything unexpected happen in December and early January. Nor, for that matter, was there any particular rush that I'm aware of to get the appointments done in the 4th and not the 6th. I do understand releasing the opinion slightly after the initial controversy had died down if we take as a given that the opinion and the appointments were in fact close to simultaneous; it allowed the administration to focus it's message on the substance of the appointments, not the procedure. But there's really no excuse for the supporting opinion to be fully finished after the appointments were made.

However, it seems to me that the real mistake here isn't in having the Office of Legal Counsel opinion finished two days after the appointments; it was failing to have the opinion finished, published, and publicized six months ago, or more. The issue hasn't changed since the Republican House began their strategy of blocking recess appointments early last year, and the administration should have immediately struck back rhetorically and then, if the House persisted, by asking OLC for very public guidance. Doing that would have then allowed Obama to at best bargain with the Senate for a deal that would have moved things forward much earlier in the year, and at worst helped to highlight the unprecedented obstruction behind all of this and the (presumably) perfectly available options held by the White House. And that's not all: Obama should have been hard on the case of the 111th Senate in 2009-2010 about how slowly they were moving; should have threatened to begin using recess appointments early and often; and then should have gone ahead an made them if threats didn't do the trick. At least getting up to the pace previous recent presidents had maintained, unless Republicans dropped their filibusters.

Not to mention that Obama should have been -- should still be -- much, much more prompt about naming people for these positions in the first place.

What would the downside have been? Perhaps Republicans might have figured out some alternative strategy for blocking recess picks, but I'm not sure what is available. Republicans, of course, could have retaliated...but it's not easy to imagine what steps would be in the GOP's interest after presidential action that wasn't in their interest before it.

Barack Obama has handled all of this poorly from day 1. The recess appointments and the publication of the OLC opinion are a good, but tiny, step in the right direction, but just one step. By not placing a priority on filling executive branch positions, he's not only hurting the smooth functioning of the government (a fault he shares with Hill Republicans), but he's also forfeiting some of the legitimate consequences of winning the 2008 election, something that is unfair both to himself and those who worked for him.

OK, that's done. More on the opinion itself in a bit.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-12T12:35:00.000-06:00

The Catch goes to reader Neil K., in response to my request for examples of Republicans who object to recess appointments based on a claim that the Senate is not in recess -- despite themselves calling the current period a recess. Here's what Neil found:

Responding to a question from the audience, Wilson said Obama's call for Congress to raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion next month is "disingenuous."
"He wanted us to approve it before Jan. 15," Wilson said. "Congress doesn't return from recess until Jan. 17."
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Dec. 30
Congress isn't in recess? You lie!

Nice find. But Neil didn't stop there; see the comments in the above posts, but there were several others, including one by Michele Bachmann. Granted, none of them are in a press release slamming the president for the appointments, as is the one that I had yesterday, but still, nice catch!

And in a related development, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel's opinion about the recess appointments is out. I'll have more to say about the substance of it later (still reading), but via Nick Baumann the OLC is apparently a late entrant into this little contest, listing entries from Senators Inhofe, Thune, Sessions, Hatch, and Cornyn.

So the CotD goes to Neil K., but for all of us, a hearty: Great catches!

A Close Election? Maybe!

2012-01-12T10:49:00.000-06:00

In general I think Kevin Drum is on the right track in his comments about the competitiveness of the general election, but I have to nitpick a bit. He says:

As near as I can tell, it's nearly unanimous conventional wisdom that this is going to be a very close race despite the fact that the Republican field is weak. Hell, Intrade has only intermittently put Obama's chances over 60% for the past year, and he's barely been better than an even bet for the past six months...So Obama is hardly a dead duck. But he's not a shoo-in either, and I really don't think anyone over the past year or so has ever suggested he is.

Is it going to be a very close race? I have no idea! Nate Silver has made this point several times, but the track record of economic predictions is, well, lousy. It's really very plausible to imagine that the recent stretch of good news about the economy continues, solidifies, and turns into a very robust recovery. It's also very plausible to imagine the trouble in Europe or an oil shock derailing the economy and leading to a new recession...or just the current marginal good news fizzling out again, as has happened repeatedly during Obama's presidency. It's also possible to imagine any number of other events that could help, or more likely hurt, Obama. That is, this isn't economic determinism; it's events (close to) determinism, with the economy as the most likely event to influence voters.

What I think we should be saying is that based on what we know right now, the chances of Obama winning reelection appear relatively close to 50/50. In other words, I think the second two sentences I quoted from Drum are correct. It's just that saying the chances are 50/50 now isn't at all the same thing as saying that it will therefore be a close race in November. From the point of view of observers, that means that we really don't know yet whether the election will be close enough that electioneering (including the strengths and weaknesses of the out-party nominee) will be important to the outcome. From the point of view of the parties, of course, it makes sense to attempt to maximize vote share regardless of the chances that it will matter, so for them it doesn't really matter how likely it is that the election will be close.

NH Trivia (And: Getting It Wrong)

2012-01-11T16:22:00.000-06:00

Looks as if they've now reached a full vote count in New Hampshire, and Newt Gingrich stayed in 4th place -- only 49 votes better than Rick Santorum.

This is, of course, exactly as I predicted, except for the part in which I said Santorum would be 3rd or better instead of 5th. Which is the reason for this mostly post...I muffed this one badly, repeatedly, and I very much want to be quite up front about it when I do that. I did mention it earlier in passing, but it deserves it's own post. I mostly feel that my track record so far during the nomination process has been okay, and I think my overall Iowa reactions (that it was then basically down to a two-candidate race, with Romney having a very large advantage) was just fine. But this particular analysis was dead wrong.

As long as I'm at it...I can't remember whether I've talked about this here or not, but I should have been more careful about lumping all the implausible nominees together. I actually had thought about this way back when, but never wrote it out at the time, which meant that what I was saying wasn't as helpful in understanding what was going on as it should have been. In particular, I should have made a distinction about different ways candidates could be implausible nominees. The distinction which has sort-of turned out to matter is that some candidates are implausible because of the incredibly unlikely chances they have of breaking out of the pack, while others are implausible because even if they did that, important party groups would act to veto them. As I've said over the last couple of weeks, I think Rick Santorum is basically in that first group -- as Ezra Klein said, the fact that Santorum surged only after everyone else had a turn was a real indication of just how poor a candidate he was. But having improbably broken from the pack, Santorum became, while still a very weak candidate (in part because of how late in the day he broke through, but in part because of the weaknesses that made that happen), couldn't be in my view completely written off. That contrasts sharply with Ron Paul, or Newt Gingrich, or Herman Cain, none of whom would have been plausible nominees even if their surges had been better timed.

Anyway, that last one was just insufficiently careful blogging (my excuse? I try to keep these things short. Really). But the other one, Santorum in New Hampshire...that one I was just dead wrong about.

What is Newt Thinking?

2012-01-11T14:47:00.000-06:00

So Newt Gingrich, fresh off a 5th place finish in Iowa and a (barely) 4th place finish in New Hampshire, now goes to South Carolina guns blazing. He's targeting Mitt Romney, but if he really wanted to beat Romney he presumably would just drop out and endorse Rick Santorum (or I suppose Rick Perry). Instead, he's choosing a course that perhaps makes it more likely that Romney will win, but that (at least in the margins) weakens him in November, which also means that he's seriously annoying GOP partisans.

So what is Newt thinking? I went through this last week with Rick Perry. Matt Glassman stresses that candidates may be acting strategically, but with goals other than winning the nomination. I mostly discounted that with Perry, but Newt? That's a whole 'nother story. There have been two basic Theories Of Newt during the 2012 cycle. The first is that it's just a brand-maintenance exercise, with the strongest version of that claiming that Newt actively doesn't want the nomination; he just wants to make money. The other is that Newt is following his visions of himself as Churchill or de Gaulle, about to be called back from political exile to save his nation at it's moment of greatest peril; if that's the case, Newt is really demeaning himself in his own eyes by even participating in the process at all.

What I can't see is how his present course of action fits with either of those goals. Surely getting beat up by Rush Limbaugh can't be good for his standing within the conservative marketplace. But it's also not good for getting the nomination! Unless this is all some elaborate plan to alienate Newt from his party, thus making him even more Churchill-like when they finally wise up and beg him to be their nominee at some unspecified point in the future (this summer? In 2016? After an EMP attack by the Iranians and the North Koreans next March?)

Or maybe, as some have said, it's just blind rage revenge against Mitt Romney, even if by staying in he's actually helping Mitt. After all, Newt is a great snake oil salesman, but not a particularly good strategist, whatever he constantly says about himself.

Catch of the Day

2012-01-11T12:55:00.000-06:00

Matt Yglesias takes apart the GOP fetish for Europe-bashing, pointing out that among other things, there are plenty of ways in which European policies are far more in line with (American) conservative preferences than US policies are.

He concludes that what Republicans are really talking about is:

The image most people have in their heads of Europe is dominated by non-policy aspects of the landscape—Europe has more old building, older urban forms, and it's more crowded—and the proclivity to praise or criticize Europe seems to me to be explained entirely by the nationalism/cosmpolitanism gap rather than any objective analysis of the European policy environment.

That could be right; as such, it's rather similar to bashing New York, which I once heard actually is home to one or two of the capitalists that Republicans often like.

Which means it also goes along with the odd Republican habit of place-bashing, whether it's coastal elites, or New York for all sorts of things, or San Francisco liberals, or Chicago-style politicians. Note that Newt Gingrich has been calling Mitt Romney a "Massachusetts moderate." I've always thought this is rather strange, not to mention unpatriotic; I've certainly heard liberals smear places that vote Republican, but it's a whole lot more common (for liberals) in comments sections or at fringe blogs (or, obviously, in conversation) than it is for actual politicians to say things like that. So in that context, saying that Obama wants a "European-style entitlement society" is almost a step up -- he's neither bashing a US city nor actually using the word "socialism."

As symbolism, the Europe-bashing works, I think, about the same way that socialism-bashing does: it's just a content-free slur that leaves Fox News customers free to fill in whatever horrors they want. It makes about as much sense as Michele Bachmann's fear of the socialist conspiracy to replace Medicare with Obamacare. So yes, I think Yglesias is right about the "cosmopolitan" thing for some people, but presumably others see other things in it.

And: nice catch!

On To South Carolina

2012-01-11T10:50:00.001-06:00

Over at Plum Line, I go over the possible outcomes in South Carolina and what they would mean going forward. Bottom line is that it's over unless Santorum (or Perry) wins in South Carolina, or at least comes very close. And that's unlikely for Santorum, and basically implausible for Perry.

I didn't get to it there, but if Santorum wins in South Carolina, I'd say that Romney would then have a 75% chance of winning the nomination, maybe more. If Perry wins, I'd say it's closer to 50/50. However, the odds of Perry winning South Carolina or placing a close second appear to be long indeed; in fact, I think it's more likely that he looks at the numbers today or tomorrow and calls it a day than that he finds some way to revive things. So figure out the chances of Santorum beating Romney in South Carolina, multiply that by maybe 20, 25%, and that's your odds for stopping Romney's coronation. If this were a World Series, Romney is up three games to none, is up a couple runs early in game 4, and is the better team with a well-rested pitching staff ready to go.

By the way, I still don't understand why anyone thinks that Newt Gingrich is more dangerous to Romney than Santorum is.

Best Self-Refuting Argument Ever

2012-01-11T00:31:00.008-06:00

Diane Black, a first-term Member of the House from Tennessee, is apparently the lead cosponsor of a resolution condemning the recent recess appointments, but House Republicans might really want to reconsider their choice. Black, according to Roll Call (emphasis added):

“It’s astounding to me that the president is claiming these are recess appointments and within his authority, when Congress was not in fact in recess,” Black said. “These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama.”

She continued:

"What’s more, the NLRB appointments were jammed through by the president before the Senate even had the chance to consider the appointees. Their names were only put forward on Dec. 15, a mere two days before the Senate recessed for the holiday. The president is clearly out of bounds here and should not be allowed to skirt the Constitution as he pleases."

Oh -- in case you're wondering whether maybe Roll Call botched the quotes...no, they're taken directly from Black's press release. So we're to believe that it's outrageous for the president to call what's happening now a recess, and the House intends to take it up as soon as they get back into town after recessing for the holiday.

Well then. Case closed?

Plum Line: New Hampshire Wrap

2012-01-10T22:51:00.001-06:00

My New Hampshire wrap is up over at Plum Line.

I should repeat the most important part of it here: I was totally wrong about Rick Santorum in New Hampshire. Right after Iowa, I said Santorum would finish third or better in New Hampshire; as of now, he's looking like he'll be edged out of fourth place, a good eight points behind Jon Huntsman for third. I also over at the Post predicted that Buddy Roemer would beat Rick Perry for sixth, but I'll give myself a mulligan on that one; he came close! And I had Romney's win right (solid, but not 20 points).

What I said then is that the three big questions were: were there really a lot of Republicans eager to find an alternative to Romney; if so, were they okay with Santorum; and, meanwhile, how good a job would Santorum do in scaling up his campaign. So far, the answers seems to be: don't know, don't know, and not very well at all. Santorum somehow or another managed to spend a big chunk of last week arguing about contraception and gays...it definitely wasn't a way to keep his bounce alive.

Still, I agree with Jonathan Chait: it's not at all impossible to imagine Santorum winning in South Carolina next Saturday, and if he does that then even if he loses in Florida he'll most likely be alive until Super Tuesday in March. At which point he would probably -- but not certainly -- lose. The odds for Santorum are certainly worse than they were a week ago, but I'm not ready to call this thing over quite yet.

Spin, Spin, Spin

2012-01-10T16:28:00.000-06:00

John Podhoretz tweets:

My prediction for NH: Whatever number Huntsman gets, the media will pronounce him the winner.

What's funny about this is that while I strongly suspect he's correct about the "neutral" press, it's also the case that what CNN or the NYT says is a whole lot less important than how the partisan press reacts. And the fun part is that they, too, are likely a lot less influenced by whatever the specific results might turn out to be, and a lot more influenced by which candidate(s) they are trying to support and attack. It's not that the raw results are irrelevant (obviously no one tried to spin Iowa as a win for Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann!), but that there's a lot of interaction between the results, the preferences of party actors, and perhaps also some of the same biases (for the unexpected, for example) that drive the neutral press.

So the truth is that if you really want to know the effects of what happens in New Hampshire tonight, you want to see not just the numbers, but also how Fox News and other conservative outlets play the news. Because that, and not what CNN says, is going to be what South Carolina Republican primary voters are watching.

Meanwhile, I've never tried this, but I'll declare this a discussion thread for talking about the primary results as they come in. If anyone is interested. I'll be over on the twitter machine I guess, but I'll check in, and then I'll be writing something up for Greg's place later.

Volatility and Free Parking

2012-01-10T13:46:00.000-06:00

Nate Silver and Micah Cohen had an interesting piece last night about the extraordinary volatility in polling during the invisible primary this year; turns out that the three most volatile candidates ever (since 1984 at least) were Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry this year, and even Michele Bachmann finished an impressive seventh, while at the same time Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both wound up on the all-time top ten most stable list. Interesting!

Silver attributes it to campaign organization, or rather the lack thereof for the unstable group. Without strong campaign organizations, they're more dependent on media attention, which comes and goes.

Plausible! But then again, two of the candidates on the most-volatile list, Howard Dean 2004 and Bill Clinton 1992, had pretty strong organizations. Not saying he's wrong, but a couple of other things occurred to me as I looked at his list. Also, it's not quite clear from the article whether which polls we're looking at, but if it's national polling then it's hard to see how organization would have much effect on the bulk of voters, since there's so little early organization in large, late-voting states.

My guess is that volatility is an effect of the lack of free parking. Let me explain. Most voters aren't focused on the nomination race at all during the year before the election. Therefore, they'll park their vote -- in the unlikely event that they need to, which is one of the effects of a pollster asking the question -- with the first candidate they can think of. When there's a heavyweight candidate, they park there and stay there; in fact, they'll likely stay there right through their primary, whenever it is. Otherwise, it's going to be whoever has been in the news latest, which moves around a lot. So I'd expect a lot more volatility when there's no obvious place for inattentive voters to park their votes.

If heavyweight candidates are people who were recently (last couple of cycles) on a national ticket, then we are talking about on the Democrats side 1984 (Mondale), 2000 (Gore), 2004 (Lieberman) and 2008 (Edwards, plus a First Lady ad hoc inclusion for Hillary Clinton). On the Republican side, 1988 (Bush)...and that's it, although subjectively I'd certainly include 1996, with Dole a three-time candidate, the previous runner-up, and a former VP nominee.

Going to the chart, eight of the most-volatile candidates are from years with no heavyweight. The stable candidates include the three big names from the 2008 Democratic contest, and one other, so four for ten.

But of course the problem is how to account for Ron Paul and Mitt Romney this year. The clue? Perhaps it's 2008 stable candidate John McCain (although -- really? that's not my memory of it...might be an artifact of the particular months they're using). The answer might be that repeat candidates are less likely to exhibit wild swings. Accounts for Pat Buchanan 1988, too, if you don't like my rigging that year by including Bob Dole as a heavyweight. That makes sense: people who haven't yet focused on the current cycle will bring their leftover feelings from the last cycle, therefore either parking their support with a candidate they remember liking or being more resistant to minor fluctuations in publicity for that candidate if they don't like him or her. Note that Edwards 2008 is on the stable list, which makes four of ten stables as repeat candidates, compared with zero for ten on the volatile list.

If I played with it a bit more...it doesn't affect the results here that much, but 2004 for the Democrats certainly turned out to behave more like a year without a heavyweight. It's possible that the quicky formula I'm using here could be tweaked to exclude Lieberman...although of course you need to be very careful about that sort of thing. I would exclude Dan Quayle's 2000 campaign, since he withdrew during the period that Silver and Cohen are using.

So that's my guess. Volatile/stable in the year before voting is a function of two things: whether there's a heavyweight in the field, and whether the candidate has run before. I strongly suspect that if Silver and Cohen run that on their database, those are going to be the big drivers, even if they had a good measure of campaign organization and tossed that in.

You Can Win a CotD!

2012-01-10T12:40:00.003-06:00

I'm leaving this open another day or two: this is your big chance to win a coveted Plain Blog "Catch of the Day." Well, at least a share of one. All you have to do is find examples of Republicans calling what Congress is up to now "recess." I'll take anything during the current...uh, what are they calling it? Anything from when they left town in December up to now. Leave them below, or email them to me. The previous call got a bit of a response, but I think I'll wait a bit more and see if anyone wants to dig up some prime examples, which I certainly expect are out there. Go for it! Nothing says success more than an authentic Plain Blog Catch of the Day -- all the cool kids already have one, and now's your chance!

On Business and Policy (Or: Why Everyone Should Read Bill James)

2012-01-10T11:16:00.000-06:00

Paul Krugman has a nice blog post this morning asking a great question: "why does anyone believe that success in business qualified someone to make economic policy?"

The best purchase on this question is to go back to something that Bill James wrote a long time ago, which unfortunately I can't locate (the Abstracts were awesome, but not indexed, and I can never find my favorite bits when I want to cite them)...if I remember correctly, and it's been some time, I wound up doing an extended riff on this once back on r.s.bb, and to tell the truth I can't remember what was his original point and what I'm remembering from what I wrote, so my apologies overall. It's about what it means to "know baseball." The idea is that there are lots and lots and lots of ways to know baseball. There's technique, such as how to throw a cut fastball or the footwork for how to take a throw at third base from right field with a runner sliding in. There's also knowing what it's like in a major league locker room. Both of those count as "knowing baseball." But so does knowing what it's like to sit in the bleachers, or knowing about what the game was like in the 19th century or the 1950. It's also "knowing baseball" to be able to watch an 18 year old kid and project how he'll be a as major leaguer in five years -- and it's "knowing baseball" to sit at your computer and figure out how much a single is worth compared to reaching on a base on balls, or how much striking out hurts the team objectively compared to other types of outs. It's knowing baseball to know the business of a baseball franchise or of the industry as a whole. And it's even knowing baseball to get involved in your roto team, or even more fictionally to read baseball fiction, whether of the DeLillo and Malamud variety or, you know, what I like.

The point of all this is that there are all sort of different kinds of knowledge that go into "knowing" baseball, and no one is a real expert at all of them -- and that different kinds of knowledge are needed to answer different types of questions.

Which, among other things, is something that Mitt Romney certainly knows, since one of the main things that Bain and other similar consultants surely face is people telling them that they don't really know whatever business it is that they're swooping in to fix up. But of course the workers in those companies probably believe that the managers don't really "know" what's going on in the business (and you can spin this out over the different types of workers, depending on the company).

And to get back to Krugman's point, there's no particular reason to believe that knowing what Romney knows about how to turn around a poorly performing business has anything at all to do with knowing how to make an overall economy perform well. Just as it's really not important to know the footwork of how to turn a double play if you want to know whether Joe Morgan was better than Ryne Sandberg, or how it feels to be in the clubhouse isn't important (or at best is only one very small piece of the puzzle) if you want to know how signing Prince Fielder will affect franchise revenue over the life of the contract. I could see an argument that Romney's skills might be particularly important for managing the executive branch well, but for getting unemployment down and income up? What Romney claims to know just doesn't seem very relevant to that part of the job.

On the other hand, while a good grasp of economics might be pretty useful for a president, I suspect that it's not nearly as important as Krugman might argue.

What are important are political skills, especially the ones relevant to governing. Good politicians tend to make good policy -- in part because in a system of separated institutions sharing powers, a president has to fight hard to get anything done, and in part because it takes good political skills to build an economic team and get them to function well.

New Hampshire Primary Day

2012-01-10T09:26:00.000-06:00

I don't think I want to run my standard election day post every time there's a primary or caucus over the next several months, plus I don't feel like writing an ode to rituals of democracy after unfortunately missing the voting in Dixville Notch late last night (I assume CSPAN had it as usual) so how about instead a quick tribute to the people who have been working so hard in the days and weeks leading up to the voting today: the politicians, the campaign professionals, and the volunteers.

I've said this before, but without meaning any disrespect, I'm always a little miffed when I see those bumper stickers telling me that if I like freedom I should thank a veteran. It's true that the US owes a debt of gratitude towards those who serve as troops. But when we say that the US is a "free" nation, we don't mean that it's not dominated by some foreign power; the contrast is to nations that are not free because they don't have liberty and democracy.

We mean it because the US has a democratic government. To have such a government, however, requires a lot of people choosing to devote a fair amount of time to democracy. Granted, many who do so are motivated by much less exalted things: people are in it for power, or for money, or for other self-interest. But that, in the end, doesn't matter; the system is set up to exploit all of that to make democracy work in a world in which most of us are self-interested much of the time.

Moreover,the particular kind of democracy that the US has always had is, at least in my view, based on the belief that it's not just about getting policies that match popular preference. It's based on the belief that participation and self-determination is inherently a good thing -- that part of true liberty is to be involved in public affairs. And the truth is that one cannot do that alone. I've talked before about the notion of "public happiness" and the ambiguity in Jefferson's peculiar turn of phrase. The "pursuit of happiness" may mean private happiness -- the ability to fully enjoy our individual lives and exploit the opportunities that a non-oppressive government makes available. But it also may mean public happiness, which is a concept the revolutionary generation had for the particular pleasure they found when they entered the public sphere and took political action together (and here I'm leaning as usual on Hannah Arendt, especially in On Revolution). The thing is that public happiness is only even potentially available (okay, I guess with the exception of starting your own revolution) if there's already a public sphere in which to operate. Now, we could talk at some length about the extent to which door-to-door campaigning for a presidential candidate really matches what they were talking about in 1776. One might argue, for example, that the civil rights movement -- which produced, by the way, similar reflections on public happiness -- is a better fit. But there's a lot to be said for non-movement politics in normal times, too.

So let's hear it today for everyone who has been been up there in New Hampshire hard at work getting the voters to the polls; for everyone who has been working in the campaign headquarters in Washington or wherever they're found; for the volunteers who drove to New Hampshire or Iowa, sacrificing their own time to work for what they see as a better nation; and especially for the candidates, whatever their motivations. You don't get any democracy -- you don't get liberty -- without them.

I wish everyone a happy New Hampshire primary day. Good luck to all the candidates, and if you have the good fortune to be a citizen of the Granite State: vote early, vote often.

Daley Out/Lew In

2012-01-09T15:45:00.000-06:00

Bill Daley has been on his way out as White House chief of staff for some time now, but he's now out for good, to be replaced by OMB director Jack Lew. I'm not going to say that WH CoS is as important as who gets presidential nominations, but it's awful important, and it's not entirely clear that the difference between Daley and Lew couldn't be close to as large as the difference would be between Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as president.

Beyond that, a nice point over twitter from Ryan Lizza, who notes that "Patience pays. Both Gene Sperling and Jack Lew, who were passed over for top WH jobs during '08 transition, are now NEC dir. and WH CoS." That also suggests that for all the attention that we pay to these decisions in November and December every four or eight years, the first WH team or cabinet isn't likely to be the last one, and may not be the most important one. And an excellent post on the transition from Ezra Klein, who reports that Lew is as popular in both the White House and Capitol Hill as Daley was not.

Meanwhile, OMB is a very important job, which will now have to be filled once again. And that one requires confirmation, so there's that headache. What I don't know: what can't an acting director do that a confirmed presidential appointee do? I sort of think that with OMB the answer is no very much, at least by statute, but that an acting director won't have the clout within the executive branch that a confirmed director would have, but I don't actually know the answer to that one. See too Stan Collender's comments about who can serve as acting director, as well as his speculation about who will get the job.

What Are Those Neutral GOP Actors Up To?

2012-01-09T14:43:00.000-06:00

Seth Masket has a good catch today -- that hardly any of the GOP superdelegates have declared for a candidate yet (yes, Republicans have automatic delegates too, although not as many as the Democrats have). As he says, that's consistent with all the other measures we've had. The superdelegate breakdown? 12 for Mitt, 3, for Perry, 1 for Santorum, and the other 89% still uncommitted.

I'm not sure I agree with Seth that all of that means that Perry is still the most likely other option if Romney winds up not winning it. Here's the problem. On the one hand, no one has ever done anything similar to what Perry will have done in Iowa and New Hampshire and then wound up coming anywhere close to the nomination. On the other hand, no one with the credentials of Gingrich, Santorum, Huntsman, or Paul has ever come anywhere close to it, either.

Which might just mean, and probably does, that Romney is going to win the nomination.

But still...why are party actors so slow to climb on board a train that certainly seems to be going places?

I think there are two possible answers. One is that they really don't want to nominate Romney, and are just waiting until they find out who the real conservative champion is going to be. If that's the case, what matters a lot is just how much they don't want to nominate him. Enough to fight hard against heavy odds? Enough to overlook flaws in whoever they settle on to support? Or just enough to wait it out and hope something will happen to the former Massachusetts governor?

But there's another strong possibility: this is much more about fear of Tea Party wrath than it is about reluctance to support Romney. That's true for politicians, but it could also be true for formal party officials (who could get bounced by angry conservatives if they get blamed for Romney), and even for some interest group leaders. If this is what's going on, then a lot of Republican actors may be thinking that they don't really have to worry very much about the Cains and the Bachmanns and the Pauls actually winning the nomination, given what lousy candidates they are, and so just sitting back and hoping Romney can wrap it up more-or-less on his own is the best strategy. This one, too, can come in various shades of intensity: we could have some who are strongly pro-Romney but afraid to say it, while others could be mildly pro-Romney and therefore quiet if they even have a hint of worry over a public endorsement.

So which of these two is it? I have no idea! But my guess is that the latter seems at least a bit more likely than the former. It's possible that there are some out there who are intensely anti-Romney but foolishly froze, waiting for the best alternative, but it seems much more likely that someone in that group would have declared for another candidate. But I don't really know. I can say one thing. If there was anyone in Group 1 (true anti-Romney) waiting to see who emerged from Iowa...well, I can understand why such people would wait another week, because if they were considering Santorum he was more likely to need the boost after New Hampshire than before it (when endorsements would perhaps get lost in the shuffle). But time is about to be up: if they're going to try to swing the party behind Santorum (or even Perry, or even --although I can't believe they would do this -- Huntsman), the time to get started on that is this week, in order to help that candidate next Saturday in South Carolina. Wait any longer, and Mitt Romney is probably going to win by default.

And if it's the second possibility -- they're just fine with Romney, but don't want to say so? Don't be surprised to see people from that group endorse Santorum (or Perry or Gingrich) after South Carolina, or even after Florida, once it's too late to matter. No one wants to have the party's nominee upset with them...but it's possible that they're even less eager to be labled RINOs for backing Romney, at least just now. There's still plenty of time to make nice-nice after the nomination is formally decided, and while I hate to suggest that things aren't always as they appear to be on the surface, it's possible that Romney wouldn't be too upset about an endorsement that he knew was just for show.

Again, I don't really know who fits into which of these groups, and where within those groups they fit (i.e. somewhat vs. strongly anti-Romney). And mostly, we won't get to know. But I think that might explain at least some of what's going on right now.

More Recess Appointment Notes

2012-01-09T12:29:00.000-06:00

While I mostly take the side of those who believe that the recess appointments were legitimate because the Senate was in fact in recess, I agree with the letter sent by Senate Republicans to the White House asking for more detail about the logic in making the appointments. I haven't seen any WH response yet, but I do think that it's appropriate to release any Justice Department or White House authored legal opinion, assuming there is one (and if there isn't, we should get to know that too).

I understand that for political reasons the administration wants to focus on the substance of consumer financial regulation. But procedure matters, and we're going to need something more than just Dan Pfeiffer saying that "Legal experts agree."

Meanwhile, a couple of things you might want to read: Nolan McCarty over at the Monkey Cage knows about the older history of recess appointments, and a second post by Matt Glassman is interesting, too.

Hey, NYT: The Recess Question Is Contested

2012-01-09T10:44:00.000-06:00

It's almost enough to make me start another round of cranky blogging. Here's Jonathan Weisman in yesterday's NYT piece on the recess appointments:

To many Republicans and some constitutional scholars, President Obama’s decision last week to ignore a sitting Senate and sidestep the confirmation process for several appointees risked nothing short of an end to the Senate’s role of providing advice and consent on presidential appointments...That compelled Mr. Obama to escalate matters further on Wednesday, making recess appointments even though the Senate was technically not in recess.

Awful. Clearly, Barack Obama doesn't believe that "a sitting Senate" is "technically in recess." That's exactly what the fight is about! Weisman isn't just coming down on the Republican's side of the dispute; by omnisciently declaring that the current period simply isn't a recess, he misstates what the entire dispute is about. In fact, the question is entirely whether the Senate is currently "sitting" -- whether the current period is a series of recesses or a recess sufficient to qualify for the Constitutional recess appointment power to kick in. But by phrasing it the way he does, Weisman implies that the issue is whether the president can just ignore the Constitution when he's frustrated by (what he sees as) Senate misbehavior.

That's not to say that reporters should always be neutral about this stuff. If Weisman, after careful research, believed that Obama was clearly on the wrong side of this, then I'd be fine with wording that would reflect that. Or, if he thought Obama had the better case, that too should be reflected in how he writes it up. So instead of "making recess appointments even though the Senate was technically not in recess," Weisman could in my view have legitimately taken a neutral tone: "making recess appointments based on a contested claim that the Senate was in a Constitutionally sufficient recess." Or a anti-appointments view: "even though his claim that the Senate was in a Constitutionally qualifying recess was disputed by most experts." Or a pro-appointments view: "although Republicans and some experts claim that the Senate is actually in session."

However, in fact Weisman doesn't even deliver enough in the article to justify any of that. The "experts" he cites outside of a White House lawyer are Bill Frist's former chief of staff and David Addington (Dick Cheney's former chief of staff), both of whom oppose the move; and the two Bush-era lawyers (Steven Bradbury and John Elwood) who support it. No neutral experts are cited at all! Only advocates, and only Republican advocates at that, at least excepting the Obama administration. That Weisman winds up adopting Addington's view, and acting as if it's some sort of consensus, only makes it worse.

Awful article on an important, and somewhat tricky, subject. NYT readers deserve a lot better.

Plum Line: What To Look For in New Hampshire

2012-01-09T10:24:00.000-06:00

Over at Greg's place, I have a post up about what to look for in the New Hampshire results. Meanwhile, a new Suffolk tracking poll has come out showing Mitt Romney continuing to slip a bit...he's down to 33% in their sounding, although while it was released last that poll wasn't taken later than a couple of others, and it might be a bit of an outlier on Romney (just as PPP seems to be a bit of an outlier, on the high side, on Jon Huntsman). I have three main points over there; the third one is:

Do the Republicans have a New Hampshire problem? If Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Ron Paul combine to take 80% or more of the vote, will conservatives seek to reform the nominating process by attempting to punish that state? The biggest complaint about Iowa and New Hampshire as the kick-off states in recent cycles has come from Democrats who object to the lack of ethnic diversity in those states, but a far greater problem could be that on the GOP side, moderates are overrepresented.

Especially in an open primary, and especially with nothing doing on the Democratic side.

By the way, if you don't click through to my post, do be sure to read Brendan Nyhan on expectations, which I link to there. Really good.

Sunday Question for Liberals

2012-01-08T14:33:00.000-06:00

Same question as the conservatives got: How good a job do you think the Democratic partisan press -- MSNBC, liberal blogs, liberal talk shows if there are any -- has done of covering the presidential nomination process during this cycle? Are they helping you understand what's going on, or just having fun bashing the candidates?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

2012-01-08T13:36:00.000-06:00

How good a job do you think the Republican partisan press -- Fox News, conservative talk shows, conservative blogs -- has done of covering the presidential nomination process during this cycle?

Debate Wraps

2012-01-08T12:15:00.000-06:00

If you want to know what I thought of the GOP night-day debate doubleheaders, my reactions are up at Plum Line: the opener here, and today's joust (is that the morningcap?) here.

Short version: nothing happened that's going to change things very much. But perhaps you already knew that.

Sunday questions coming shortly. I do have a bit of a housekeeping question, however: when I write my (usually once-a-day) posts at Plum Line, and when I have columns or other items elsewhere, would everyone like me to write a short post here directing you to it? I haven't made a practice of doing so, but I did get one request recently, so I figured I'd throw it over to you.

What Mattered This Week?

2012-01-07T13:19:00.000-06:00

Well, let's start with the obvious: the Iowa Caucuses matter in various ways that I've been talking about all week. Also, the bounce Santorum is getting (or perhaps not getting -- he flattened out in one poll today) out if Iowa will determine whether this thing is over real quickly or whether it will be contested for a while.

Syria, again. Here's a question: other than within Iraq, how important should we think the events there are right now? Yemen was in the news too this week, and Egypt.

A fairly good jobs report continues the string of better US economic numbers, which matters both economically and politically, of course.

And the recess appointments matter -- for substantive reasons in the affected agencies, and because of the precedents involved.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Friday Baseball Post

2012-01-07T00:39:00.001-06:00

(UPDATED)

I've been more inconsistent than usual about posting these lately, but back on track this week. First, the sad news is the great Greg Spira, baseball analyst, founder of the Internet Baseball Awards, and estwhile rec.sport.baseball regular back during the heyday of rsbb, died last week. Here's Greg on player birthdays, and on pitching to the score (it's a myth). See also a fine appreciation by Dave Pease. I only knew him through rsbb, but anyone who helped make that place work is very high on my list. I miss rsbb, and I'll miss Greg.

UPDATE: A tribute site has been set up here. Also looks as if the IBAs are going to be named for him, which is good to see -- nice job, BP people.

Meanwhile, it's time for a HOF post. We'll hear the results this coming week; here's my two cents.

It's another year without any major obvious types added to the ballot. As I said last year, of the returning candidates McGwire, Raines, Trammell, Larkin and Bagwell all seem like obvious choices to me. And I still feel the same way about Palmeiro: he was never a favorite of mine, and he doesn't really stand out all that much from the other 1Bs, but I can't really come up with a legitimate reason to vote against him. So six fairly easy ones for me.

I have five continuing players who are tough cases for me. Edgar Martinez, McGriff, Parker, Murphy, and Walker. I've been saying yes on Edgar and McGriff, a solid no on Parker, and I punted on Murphy and Walker -- didn't have enough room.

Of the new players, the only real candidate is Bernie Williams. An awful good player...but I think he falls short. His peak was high enough that I'd vote for him if he had a long career, but he didn't have a long career, and for a peak vote I'd like to have someone who was clearly one of the best players in baseball for a few years, and he really wasn't. Even if you give him credit for an extra season's worth of excellent postseason play, which I do. I don't know that he had a better career than Ellis Burks, and I think he wasn't as good as Reggie Smith, and I sort of think of Smith as my HOF CF cutoff. Put it another way: I'm pretty sure that Dale Murphy's peak is better (helps to play every single game, by the way), and their career length is the same...Murphy, of course, packed more of his career into his peak than Williams did, but I think that's a better career shape.

Can I just vote for Reggie Smith? I suppose he's probably on the one-and-out HOFers, along with Lou Whitaker, among others.

Larry Walker? I'm going to say no again. I'm not sure why...baseball-reference has him worth 67 wins, which is certainly HOF territory. He had a short career for a HOFer, and I guess I just never thought that he was really in the conversation for best player in baseball. Or even best player, merely mortal division (since Bonds was around). Certainly couldn't fault anyone who voted for him, but I wouldn't at this point.

One more person to talk about...Christina Kahrl (speaking of rsbb greats) says she would vote for Lee Smith. Really? I was a huge fan when he was playing, and I'd love to say that I would support his case, but I don't see it. Lots of guys during his time had much better (short) peaks, so it really comes down to what longevity is worth in that position in an era that it was very hard to come by. I don't see it. If my team developed a Lee Smith who comes to the majors in 1980 is it really going to make a difference? See, that's the problem; I don't think so.

So it's McGwire, Raines, Trammell, Larkin, Bagwell, Palmerio, Edgar, McGriff, and Murphy. Yes, I know, that's four 1Bs, and that doesn't seem right. The last one in was Murray, though, in 2003, and before that (if you don't count Tony Perez, who is an obvious mistake, or Orlando Cepeda, who I'm obliged to not believe was a mistake) you go all the way back to McCovey in 1986, unless I missed someone.

Of course, the real fun comes next year -- and starting next year, it looks as if there will be not enough room on the ballot for a long, long time. The ones I'm really rooting for this year? The first three on that list -- McGwire, Rock Raines, and Trammell. All clear HOFers, all really needing a surge this year to get into the territory where it's pretty clear that it'll work out eventually, even if it takes a while.

Perry's Odd Decision

2012-01-06T15:12:00.001-06:00

I've been meaning to get to this for a while now...it seems to have become rather long and meandering. I guess that makes it appropriate for a Friday afternoon.

Nate Silver had an outstanding post up earlier in the week regarding Rick Perry's about-face about dropping out. It's really, really, first-rate. Silver goes through the possibilities of what Perry is up to. Perhaps it's a personal, emotional decision despite there being no plausible chance of winning; or, perhaps there's additional information we don't know about, and he's actually making a "highly informed and strategic decision." We don't know! Go read it.

It's just a much smarter, and more interesting, and more useful post than what I wrote earlier about the decision, which was just the smaller point that we shouldn't necessarily believe his first claim that he's staying in. In my defense, I watched a lot of cable news on Tuesday! I wound up just way annoyed at how the cable news people had apparently never heard of any candidate who says that's she's staying in the race forever on one day and then drops out the next, and wanted to remind everyone of that...which is fine as it goes, but sort of misses the big point of what Perry may or may not be up to. Ah well -- if you read the comments to that post, a bunch of the commenters had useful things to say. But Silver nailed it.

I do want to clean up a couple of things he said that need a bit of clarification.One is that Silver thinks that political scientists "prefer" the second type of explanation, the incentive- and institutional-based explanation. I don't think that's correct as a blanket generalization. Most good political science leaves plenty of room for personal variation in how (for example) politicians respond to incentives.

The other thing is something that Silver called the "maximal expression" of incentive-based reasoning about his stuff, which is the thing that I usually say: that the best way to think of it is that they're all candidates, everyone from Tim Pawlenty to Haley Barbour to Mitch Daniels to John Thune. And I'm comfortable with defending that position...but I should point out that as far I know, it's sort of peculiar to me, at least as explicitly stated.

At any rate, I'm not complaining, but I do want to point out that lots and lots of political scientists, myself certainly included, do not treat politicians as if they are nothing but rational utility calculators.

OK, let's hide some substance down here at the bottom of the post. Following Silver's logic, Perry could be staying in because of a personal and emotional reaction to the situation; he could be staying in because he mistakenly believes that he could still win; or he could be staying in because he correctly believes he could still win.

If it's the first two, we have nothing much to analyze; the only question is how much he would take away from Santorum in South Carolina, and the answer is: probably not much, and not enough to make much of a difference.

What about the possibility that he correctly believes he still could have a chance? What's interesting about that is that it would really mean that something in the process would have changed. Certainly no candidate in the reform era has failed to register any success in either Iowa or New Hampshire and then come anywhere close to the nomination. So something would have to have changed. One possibility is the Mickey Kaus theory -- that media spin and news cycles have accelerated so much that the normal relationship between Iowa and New Hampshire, and then New Hampshire and the rest of the states, breaks down. If that's the case, then it just wouldn't necessarily matter that Rick Santorum broke out in Iowa and Perry finished out of the money; we would still be in the pre-Iowa situation in which a slight bit of good news could spark a surge from any candidate, and Perry would still be better positioned than Santorum (or Newt, or Paul) to take advantage of it.

The other possibility, at least the other one I can think of, is that the "party decides" side of things has strengthened so much that it overwhelms the media-centered mechanisms that make Iowa and New Hampshire so important. That is, if it's even more the case now that party actors' decisions determine the nomination, then perhaps those decisions could be made much later in the process and rapidly enforced by the parties (presumably through use of the partisan media). So: if all this was true, then Perry might simply be waiting for conservative party actors and groups to finally make their decision -- and the results in Iowa and New Hampshire might be irrelevant to that decision.

I'm willing to believe that both of those things are possible...but I don't think either is particularly likely. To put it another way: there are two different tracks here. One is about party actors, everything from elected politicians on down to activists, collectively competing and cooperating to settle on a nominee. The other is about ordinary voters and the mass media. Since about 1980 or 1984, the first track has been able to impose its choice on the second track in part by knowing how the incentives and mechanisms of the second track work (although that's not all; party actors also presumably also use the primaries and caucuses to gather information about the candidates, including how they appeal to voters, so it can run both ways). If, however, the mechanics of how the media works and how voters are influenced has changed sufficiently, it's always possible that the party will lose control (as it did in the 1970s when the rules were new and party actors were slow to adapt), or that the party's control will be much stronger (perhaps through advances in partisan polarization and the partisan press).

I don't believe either of those changes have happened. The only change I've really observed is an acceleration of the early winnowing that has been showing up in GOP nomination cycles for some time now. But the evidence so far is still consistent with the possibility of significant change, and of course we should always be open to that possibility. And a Perry comeback now would certainly, I'd say, indicate that things have changed somehow.

Should We Call It "Nullification"?

2012-01-06T13:06:00.000-06:00

I do think that the GOP tactic of attempting to keep agencies from functioning by filibustering any possible nominee is a big deal. I'm not sure whether it's an entirely new strategy -- wasn't there a similar situation with the FEC a few years back? -- but I do think it's a highly significant case of Constitutional hardball.

But is "nullification" the right word for it? Neither Tom Mann nor James Fallows is particularly quick to use overheated rhetoric, and they're the two that have pushed the term, and I'm reluctant to disagree with either of them. Seth Masket, however, argues that there's a key difference: Constitutional hardball (as Matt Glassman points out) is by definition staying within the literal rules of the game, while 19th century nullification was most certainly not doing so. So I'm sort of with Joshua Huder in not particularly feeling very good about calling the current GOP tactic by the same name.

I suspect this ship has sailed, but I wish I had an alternative name to substitute for "nullification" that would similarly denote the seriousness of this particular form of Constitutional hardball without implying that it actually crosses over into breaking the literal rules of the Constitutional system.

You Can Win a CotD!

2012-01-06T10:21:00.000-06:00

Bringing back a fun opportunity from last summer: yes, you can join Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, Brad DeLong, and other luminaries as a winner of a coveted Plain Blog "Catch of the Day." I'll award one (probably Monday), with any luck shared, to all those who can come up with instances of Republicans who have referred to the current Congressional situation as a "recess." No Scott Brown, please: he's supporting the recess appointments. But everyone else is fair game. Be sure to include a solid citation, and leave it in comments here or email it to me. Of course, the best ones are those who have been loudest in denouncing the recess appointments. Go for it!

Read Stuff, You Should

2012-01-06T08:35:00.000-06:00

Some old stuff, some recent stuff, but lots of it. Enjoy!

1. Let's start with GOP WH 2012. Back in December my brother David S. Bernstein read Michele Bachmann's book. Good fun! In Iowa, John Sides reported on the Santorum surge. Daniel Larison is appalled by Santorum's foreign policy. And there's been a vigorous and interesting debate about Ron Paul recently, and I'm not going to link to all of it, but I did like this Dan Drezner post. Alyssa Rosenberg wasn't thrilled with GOP rhetoric. And Steve Kornacki on John McCain's grudge politics.

2. Recess appointments: Laurence Tribe has a good NYT op-ed today supporting the president's action; he think it's clearly Constitutional. Ezra Klein had a good post on how these four appointments are different than the other potential ones Obama didn't make: it's all about nullification.

3. Conference committees were in the news recently; Sarah Binder talked about how rare they've become, while Jordan Ragusa cleared up some myths.

4. Greg Marx caps off the recent controversy about fact-checkers with an interesting essay. Must-read for those interested in that debate.

5. Of course I'm going to link to any horse-race coverage with actual horse racing analogies or references. In this case, Matt Glassman on InTrade and longshots. If I made a list of the top dozen US spots I've never been to that I'd like to get to, no question that Saratoga is on that list, so I'm a little jealous.

6. David Adkins on "no true libertarian."

7. A great Ta-Nehisis Coates post...from last month, but terrific.

8. Matt Yglesias learns the lessons of the stimulus.

9. Fred Kaplan looks at North Korea.

10. Interesting essay on education, from Dana Goldstein.

11. The GOP and Braveheart. Alex Massie has fun.

12. And public policy really does have consequences: what could have entered the public domain this week. Although note: restored movies are nice, too -- does that happen to a public domain "To Catch a Thief"? Just asking.

Santorum/Newt

2012-01-05T16:13:00.000-06:00

I'm still completely baffled by all the pundits, and at least reportedly the Romney campaign, who think that Newt was a bigger threat to Romney than Santorum. He's still beating Santorum on InTrade (6.4% to 6.0%) even now. Not that I think Santorum is a strong candidate, but stronger than Newt Gingrich? Isn't that obviously true?

That is all.

Is It a Recess? Who Decides?

2012-01-05T14:41:00.000-06:00

I've seen one argument on recess appointments that is worth knocking down right away; it's made by liberal Tim Noah over at TNR, and conservative John Yoo at NR: that Congress, and not the president, get to decide whether or not Congress is in "recess" when it is not actually meeting.

There's simply no Constitutional support for that at all. The clause about recess appointments is in Article II, for whatever that's worth (that is, the article about the president, not the Congress). It just talks about "the Recess of the Senate." That's it. There's no definition at all about what "counts" as a recess, or whose job it is to say what counts.The word "recess" only comes up one other time in the Constitution, in a (now-obsolete) similar clause about state legislatures and U.S. Senate appointments. There's nothing at all about who gets to define recess.

Here's what Yoo says:

President Obama is making a far more sweeping claim. Here, as I understand it, the Senate is not officially in adjournment (they have held “pro forma” meetings, where little to no business occurs, to prevent Obama from making exactly such appointments). So there is no question whether the adjournment has become a constitutional “recess.” Rather, Obama is claiming the right to decide whether a session of Congress is in fact a “real” one based, I suppose, on whether he sees any business going on.
This, in my view, is not up to the president, but the Senate.

This may be Yoo's position, but it would be a break with precedent. As You knows (since he refers to it in his article), the current three-day minimum standard is derived from a Clinton-era Justice Department opinion. Not the Senate. The Justice Department.

Of course, Yoo and Noah could still be correct that the decision should rest with the Senate. But the Senate has never, as far as I know, made any such determination. There are various minor technical differences between the various times that the Senate is out of session (intersession, between different Congresses, overnight/weekend intrasession, and longer intrasession), but the the Senate generally does not use different vocabulary for them, and certainly does use the word "recess" for the breaks relevant here. The Senate does not, in any official way, announce that they are now in recess for the purpose of the Constitutional appointments clause.

Moreover, and this is why the point I made yesterday is I think relevant: even if it were up to the Senate, we know that the Senate Majority Leader, and presumably the majority of the Senate, support the president's recess appointment. Surely Yoo doesn't believe that the Speaker of the House has a Constitutional role to play in determining whether a recess counts as a "Recess of the Senate"?

Granted, I wouldn't say that it must be a real Recess just because the president and the Majority Leader agree that it is; they could certainly be wrong, either honestly or cynically.

The actual issue here -- how long does a recess of the Senate have to be before it counts as a Recess of the Senate for these purposes -- is legitimately contentious, because we don't really have any guidance for what "recess" means in this context. That's why I'd like to see exactly what the WH is relying on (as Kevin Drum said yesterday). And while I believe I agree with the decision, I think there's plenty of room for legitimate disagreement on substantive grounds. But as far as the procedure, I just don't see it as a problem for the White House to have its own interpretation of a vague Constitutional clause in cases where precedent doesn't apply. There's no reason for the president to defer to Congress on the definition.

Why The Primaries Matter Even If Romney Has It Won

2012-01-05T13:23:00.000-06:00

I mentioned earlier I have an article in the new Washington Monthly about one of the key things worth knowing about presidential elections: candidates actually do carry out their promises. I go through the political science research, and tell a few stories -- such as how the context of the 2000 nomination battle pushed George W. Bush to unveil a major tax-cut initiative, which of course he then went on to fight for from the White House.

That's why the remaining Republican primaries and caucuses matter, as long as the nomination is still being contested, even if Mitt Romney is overwhelmingly likely to win. As long as he still has to fight for it, he's going to be pushed to take positions that will appeal to the various primary electorates, state by state. And the structure and context of the thing can matter. A Romney vs. Santorum contest imposes different incentives on him than, say, a Romney vs. Gingrich race would have done, because the kinds of attacks that Romney would want to use against the two differ. Remember, even a sure-thing nomination such as Al Gore or George W. Bush after Iowa in 2000 still is run by people who are paid to be paranoid about the chance of losing a "safe" election, and part of what goes into an estimate that Romney is likely to win is that we assume he'll continue campaigning hard until it's over. Which means, in many cases, making new promises about public policy.

More broadly, and I haven't studied this so it's just speculative for now, I'd guess that Romney's reputation as a closet moderate would lead to more specific promises during the nomination struggle. A Santorum or a Bachmann doesn't need to prove that he or she is "really" a conservative, and so they can campaign on rhetoric alone (although in many circumstances a specific issue position can be useful if it promises to differentiate the candidates in a helpful way). Again, I'm just guessing here, but maybe that's why Romney wound up with a 59-point economic plan.

So the twists and turns of the nomination process really can matter even if they wind up with a result everyone expected from the get-go. At least, if the winner of that nomination winds up in the White House next January. Of course, that's a whole different story, for now -- except that the more contested the nomination remains, the more Romney is going to be pressed to take positions that hurt him in November. Which means that there are two good reasons to pay attention to what's happening now in New Hampshire and South Carolina, even if you're confident that Romney will wind up as the GOP nominee.

Read Stuff, You Should

2012-01-05T09:19:00.000-06:00

I owe a real links post, but this one is slightly off-format -- but well worth it. This is the stuff that I'm going to be reading as soon as I can -- well, plus a little self-promotion, if you don't mind.

1. Washington Monthly has an excellent issue out about what will happen should the Republicans win in 2012. I kick it off with a piece about how presidents tend to do exactly what they said they would do while campaigning. Which is another reason to watch the nomination process carefully. Even if you believe that Mitt Romney has had it won from the beginning, it matters a lot what he has to do while campaigning, because the promises he makes in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and the rest really will constrain him in office.

Anyway, I was happy to write the piece, but when I saw who else they had enlisted for the issue, I couldn't wait to read through it. Ready? Dave Weigel on Tea Party influence. Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein on Congress. Dahlia Lithwick on the Courts. James Traub on foreign policy. David Roberts on the environment. Mike Konczal on financial regulation. And Harold Pollack on health care. As I said, I haven't read any of these yet, but that's a terrific lineup, no?

2. Nothing about me in this one, but there's a new issue of The Forum focusing on the Senate. Again, a terrific lineup. I'm not going to link to all of it (just click over and explore), but there's a lot of terrific people: Sarah Binder, Greg Koger, Eric Schickler and Gregory Wawro, Frances E. Lee, Charles O. Jones, and much more. As always, free after some annoying pass-through stuff. Again, I haven't read any of it yet, but most articles over at The Forum are pretty accessible to non-academics. Looks very good, and I highly recommend.

3. I don't think I've actually mentioned this here: the book is out! That's The Making of the Presidential Candidates 2012, edited by William G. Mayer and Jonathan Bernstein (hey, that's me!). Bill's been doing this for several cycles now, and he added me as co-editor this time around; it is the premier edited volume about the presidential nomination process. This one, I have read! And it's terrific. Wayne Steger, Andrew Dowdle, and Randall Adkins on predicting nomination races; Antonhy Corrado on campaign finance; Andrew Busch on the Tea Party; Michael Cornfield on "the Densification of Presidential Campaign Discourse"; Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter on TV coverage; and William Mayer on presidential selection...in 1788-89. Actually, I haven't read Bill's chapter yet, and I'm very much looking forward to it. Oh, and there's also one contribution from someone who isn't a political scientist, although he does know a little bit about running for president: Michael Dukakis, on "The Experience of Running for President." All that, plus an appendix with facts and figures from presidential nomination history. All great stuff, if I do say so myself. Check it out! Assign it in your campaigns & elections class! Also probably makes a terrific birthday or anniversary gift -- looks highly impressive on your bookshelf (and yes, there's an e-version).

Recess!

2012-01-04T16:26:00.001-06:00

(Updated)

The major breakthrough finally comes: Barack Obama announced in his speech in Ohio today that he was going to recess appoint Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and then later that he would use the same Article II power to fill the vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

So here we go. This is, to be sure, uncharted waters. In both directions.

First: Republican obstruction of the normal advise and consent procedures has been, without a doubt, unprecedented. That began with the blanket filibusters against everything in the Senate -- that is, the "60 vote" Senate, which did not exist across the board until January 2009. That extended to Republican "nullification" -- the tactic of prohibiting agencies they don't like for fulfilling their lawful functions by refusing to allow any nominee to come up for a vote. In the case of the NLRB, this actually wound up producing a Republican filibuster of a Republican nominee in order to keep that board (which by statute has both Democratic and Republican appointees) from having a quorum needed to operate.

But that's all about the norms of regular confirmation. What really pushed the rules was (as Congressional scholar Sarah Binder describes) the Republican House's attempt to prevent recess appointment by using pro forma sessions. That's a tactic that was deployed by the Senate Democratic majority near the end of George W. Bush's administration to prevent recess appointments. Whatever it's legitimacy in that case, it's yet another stretch for the House of Representatives, which has no Constitutional role in executive branch nominations, to use Constitutional machinery to block a Senate recess in order to prevent recess appointments.

So that's the real "unprecedented" in this case. Whatever the president decided in order to react to GOP obstruction would have been unprecedented, because we've just never been here before. Remember, until very recently, a party that held the Senate and the White House would simply confirm most nominees speedily, with any opposition at all rare, and filibusters unheard of, until the 1990s. The only significant exceptions were the ends of presidential terms when the Senate was held by the out-party, which of course isn't the case now.

Now, Obama's response. As Binder points out, the problem is that the presidential power here is Constitutionally undefined. The Constitution only says that "[t]he President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate." So what counts as a recess? That's up for grabs, as this CRS report and my somewhat shorter summary of it explained.

Indeed, Obama had three possible responses to the "pro forma session" tactic. He could have used the Teddy Roosevelt trick of using the space between the First Session and the Second Session of the 112th Congress yesterday; he could have used a previously untried Constitutional provision to resolve the dispute about recess in favor of the Senate; or he could, as he did today, choose the argument that the non-recess recess was a sham, and that it was sufficient to trigger the Constitutional authority.

None of the three is firm, precedent-affirmed Constitutional ground, although in my view all three are probably kosher (note in particular that the TR intersession appointments were contested by Congress, although only after it was a moot point, so there's no particular reason to believe that TR style appointments would have been on any firmer ground). For the relevant court cases, see the above-linked CRS report or my explainer, or see Think Progress's Ian Millhiser's argument or Sarah Binder's conclusion. On the other hand, see Steve Smith's comment to Binder's post, and see also Matt Glassman's post. The White House has issued a statement, but it's mostly boilerplate, and so far they haven't released (at least that I've seen) a full legal opinion on the matter, which would presumably clarify and (for pro forma sessions) override a Clinton-era opinion that interpreted the Constitutional requirement as a three-day minimum. Basically, however, it appears that they are arguing that any pro forma sessions would be insufficient to prevent a Constitutional "recess." That doesn't sit well with Smith and Glassman, who both argue that it's up to Congress to decide what to do when they're in session, which they plainly are during those pro forma meetings. That's a strong argument, and might even win in court, but I disagree, as do Bush-era DOJ lawyers, although I certainly agree with Kevin Drum that we'll have to see the legal opinion the WH is working from. One key point to me: the Senate Majority Leader agrees with the president's decision. After all, if the majority of the Senate (as voiced by its Leader) agrees that the Senate is in a Constitutionally-qualifying recess, it's a lot harder to argue that the president is unilaterally changing the rules.

I don't agree, then, with Tim Noah, who finds no justification for the action, and argues that this would open up the possibility of appointments during normal weekend recesses (or while he doesn't mention it, recess appointments when the Senate recesses overnight). The key is that the White House isn't saying anything about the three-day minimum; they're just arguing that what's happening now is really a weeks-long recess, not a bunch of little three-day recesses. In fact, once the option of intra-session recess appointments was established (which was done in the mid-20th century), there's no reason at all to assume that there's any difference between inter- and intra-session recesses. In other words, using the (again, established but contested) TR precedent would, some might argue, be far more of a justification for future weekend "recess" appointments than would what Obama did today.

Look, what we have here is an ambiguous, vague Constitutional clause. The president has every right to interpret it in his favor. At least in this case that he's doing is, in my view, a lot less hostile to the spirit of the Constitutional and certainly to the spirit of norms and precedents than what Republicans in Congress have been up to. And, again, one could make that same argument for Senate Democrats under Bush -- but at least they had the argument that recess appointments would be going around their Constitutional role (the only question is whether their solution was legitimate). House Republicans, and perhaps minority-party Senate Republicans, have much less of a case.

The real solution to all of this is to reform executive branch nominations and confirmation. And that's why I really like these appointments: they show a president who (finally) seems to care about that process, and perhaps may use the threat of further appointments, either now or next year if he is re-elected, to push for much-needed reform. What's needed is a way to action on these appointments much more rapid while preserving the Senate's important role, but at the same time finding procedures or incentives for compromise during times of divided government. Will we get it? I don't know, but I am convinced that this is at least possibly a step in that direction.

(Updated to include the point about Harry Reid)

Bachmann Out

2012-01-04T13:28:00.000-06:00

The fun parts of the Republican race are starting to fade away: first we lost Prince Herman, and now Michele Bachmann is calling it a day.

Her withdrawal speech was vintage Bachmann, of course, although to my ears at least (even) heavier on the God talk than was her standard campaign stump speech and debate rhetoric. But it was, as usual, heavy on the socialism-bashing, and even better heavy on her special brand of self-aggrandizement: how Michele Bachmann has been all that's standing between all that is good and wholesome and blessed on the one hand, and the nefarious socialist in the White House on the other. Which, as usual, takes the form of her bragging about being the one who opposed Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank, and the debt limit increase, and everything else that...every other Republican opposed, and passed anyway. What's wonderful about her self-image is that it's so removed from reality. In reality, of course, she's not a fighter in Congress; she's an irrelevant back-bencher who was denied a subcommittee chair and mainly just shows up and says crazy things on cable news shows, and couldn't get a single Member of the House to back her bid. Not even her buddy Steve King from Iowa, who might well have helped her a bit.

Of course, her "knowledge" of the issues, or for that matter socialism, is equally detached from reality -- my favorite one, among many greats, is her repeated charge that Obama has a secret socialist plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with "Obamacare." I mean, how do you even respond to that? I'd love to know whether she's sincere and just massively ignorant about the programs she opposes, but I guess we don't get to know things like that about our politicians. Anyway, no doubt those who watch will be seeing plenty of her on Fox News and the Chris Matthews show and other such programs, but as a presidential candidate she was entertaining in her way, and as such she'll be missed from the campaign trail,

Perry Still In?

2012-01-04T10:59:00.000-06:00

The news this morning is that Rick Perry, after going back to Texas to reassess his candidacy, is...staying in? That's what's apparently happening, according to multiple sources. I suppose it might even be true. On the other hand...no one says they're out until they're really out, and plenty of campaigns have pulled more sudden u-turns: I wouldn't be at all surprised if this reprieve lasts only 24 or 48 hours.

Why would a campaign do that? Well, if they really are trying to calculate their chances, then they would want potential donors and current supporters to believe that they're still in, for now. Drop this out there, and see if any money comes in over the next day or two. See, too, what their high-visibility supporters tell them. Until you're absolutely certain that you're dropping out, there's no reason to even hint at it. So they might just be making one last bluff.

And even if Perry and his staff believe they're going to stay in, that's still no guarantee that they'll still believe that after a couple of days.

So I only know what I read, but I just wouldn't take claims that he's staying in at face value.

Delegates and the Ron Paul Strategy

2012-01-04T08:24:00.001-06:00

You're going to hear a lot about Ron Paul's nifty plans to snag delegates by out-organizing the other campaigns. See for example this article about how Paul's people were trained to stick around after the straw poll vote portion of the caucuses in order to secure as many next-stage delegates as possible (in the Iowa multistage caucus process).

It's very unlikely to matter.

Here's the deal. Ron Paul is, of course, not going to be the Republican nominee; in fact, he's not going to come remotely close. His faction is going to struggle to stay over 15% of the vote in most states, and under Republican rules that's not going to translate into all that many delegates. Other than the very, very unlikely event that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum battle to a delegate tie similar to last night's Iowa caucuses tie, it's not really going to matter very much to the nomination whether Paul gets 5%, or 10%, or even 20% of the delegates (and, really, gaming out all the obscure rules isn't going to get him a total delegate share larger than his overall vote share, so it's not going to be 20%).

Nor will it matter very much at the convention whether Paul leads an army of delegates or just a handful for reasons beyond the nomination. On the issues where Paul varies wildly from the rest of the GOP -- foreign policy, civil liberties, and a few others -- he's not going to win. For the rest, the real leverage that Paul has isn't the number of delegates who will listen to him; it's the vote in November. Whether Romney (or Santorum) will buy the threat that he jumps third party or just tells them to stay home isn't going to have anything at all to do with whether Paul has a couple hundred or a couple dozen delegates at the convention.

The truth is that even though delegate counts are what formally determine the nominee, very few nomination battles have come down to delegate counts. So, yes, it makes sense to maximize whatever you can maximize (and don't think that the Romney campaign is going to just allow the Paul people to grab delegates uncontested, by the way). But it just isn't very likely to make much of a difference.

The Case for and against Santorum

2012-01-03T15:49:00.000-06:00

I'm convinced that Santorum has already, if he finishes third or better, managed to achieve an improbable result. Not just by getting one of the fabled "three tickets" out of Iowa, but to do so when one of those tickets, the Ron Paul one, is for a candidate with no chance at all to win the nomination.

In fact, should Iowa finish the way it looks like (but might not), I don't see any realistic chance that anyone else could defeat Mitt Romney and actually win the nomination. Yes, I can imagine some real longshot possibilities, but other than a strong fourth place for Rick Perry somehow reviving his campaign, I don't think any of them are particularly worth wasting time on.

So the question then is what kind of chance Santorum has. And the conventional wisdom seems to be: practically none. InTrade, always a useful guide to conventional wisdom (if not much else; their record as a predictor this year is a disaster), has Santorum at a tiny 2.5% right now, fifth behind Paul, Gingrich, and Huntsman. Ezra Klein probably has the conventional wisdom summarized in a post yesterday titled "Sorry, Santorum fans, but Romney will win this." Here's what Klein thinks:

Rather than challenging Romney, Paul and Santorum are preventing a challenge to Romney. There is reason to think that a candidate like Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry could make a strong run at Romney if they caught momentum out of Iowa. But Paul and Santorum are squeezing those candidates out in Iowa, and since Romney is almost certainly going to romp to victory in New Hampshire, it’s much harder to see where a plausible not-Romney can score an upset victory that would actually change the underlying dynamics of the race. The strength that Paul and Santorum are showing in Iowa is, in other words, a boon to Romney’s chances, not a threat to them.

I half agree: I agree with the Rick Perry part of that (Newt? Why do people think that Newt would have any chance one-on-one against Romney?). But I'm not sure why Klein, and a lot of other people, are writing off the possibility that Santorum could compete in other states.

Now, it's not as if I think that Romney is really weak; to the contrary, I've been saying all year that he had an excellent chance of winning and that the anti-Romney thing is overblown. But when I see Klein asking for a scenario other than Romney winning...well, it seems pretty obvious to me. It's not a likely scenario, but for what it's worth, here's how it works.

First, Rick Santorum finishes first, second, or third (behind Romney and Paul) in Iowa. Second, as the new and unexpected kid on the block, he gets a ton of publicity, just as Gary Hart did after a distant second place finish in 1984. Plausible so far?

Third, he leapfrogs the field and finishes second in New Hampshire. The most recent poll there had Ron Paul second with 16%. Romney was at 43% and Huntsman at 10%; that leaves a whopping 31% who aren't interested (so far) in the three who have campaigned there the most. He's already at 5%, just five points behind Huntsman. Is it really difficult to imagine Santorum half of the other 26% and finishing second if he's all over the news for the next week? Or at least finishing third and knocking Huntsman out?

And so Santorum arrives in South Carolina, and then Florida, as the conservative alternative to Romney. He has more-or-less conventional credentials for the presidency, and he hardly deviates from conservative orthodoxy on anything significant. And Romney is still sitting there with the same liabilities he's had all year, all of which has preventing him from polling above 30% and, more importantly, has prevented him from having an endorsement profile similar to what George W. Bush had in 2000. Santorum picks up some high-profile conservative support, and with only three candidates still actively running he consolidates the conservative vote and wins South Carolina. Again, plausible? Sure seems so to me.

Now, it's a two-candidate race (with Ron Paul still around). As long as the contests are one at a time, free media swamps paid media, but Santorum starts taking in money and expanding his campaign after Iowa. By Florida, he's ready, and he beats Romney there, too, with hawkish Cuban-Americans and pro-lifers lining up solidly for him. Once again, plausible? I think so.

If you put it all together, I just don't see writing him off if the results are as expected tonight.

However...

Setting the odds is a lot harder. I see three ways he could collapse, or perhaps the right way to say it is fail to take off, between now and South Carolina.

1. I've talked about this before: it's possible that Romney really does have this won, and we just don't know it yet. It's possible that over the next week or two, dozens of endorsements that Romney has held in his pocket all along will be trotted out, and it will turn out he really was as strong as Bush 2000; we just don't know it yet. I'm usually skeptical of that sort of thing, but I can imagine it being a decent strategy in this case, with Iowa so unpredictable.

2. Republican party actors may reject Santorum as the conservative alternative. That's what happened with Gingrich among those who knew him in Washington; it's happening with Ron Paul among a variety of GOP groups and party actors. We have very little evidence on this, but what there is suggests that Santorum won't be subject to vetoes from any group. The latest Pollster survey of "Party Outsiders" -- party actors in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina -- had pretty good news for him. He's already a strong third in South Carolina among this group and has lots of second-choice support. I wish Mark Blumenthal had asked which candidates were not acceptable, but I don't see much of a problem for Santorum in what we do have. But we don't really know what Washington-based party actors might do when faced with a choice of Romney or Santorum, and it's certainly possible that they would shy away from him.

3. And then there's Santorum himself, and his campaign. He would have to immediately scale himself up to handle the intense crush of a serious national campaign, and his campaign would have to follow within a few weeks. I don't think it's especially important that he doesn't have any money right now, because he'll get plenty of free media at first, but before long he's going to have to manage a national campaign without disasters. There are plenty of candidates who appeared fine on paper who couldn't handle that transition -- just ask Rick Perry.

And if he avoided those three dead ends? Well, then he's still going one-on-one against Mitt Romney, who would still have a major head start (in campaigning; not in delegates). Even if a whole lot of conservatives rally to his side, and no major party factions or groups try to veto him, there's still no guarantee that he'd actually win.

I'm not really sure how to set odds on all of that stuff, but I'm certain that it's better than the 2.5% that InTrade is offering. Is it 5%? A bit more? As much as 10%? Even 15%? I'm really not sure, but I would say that a one-in-seven chance seems more reasonable than a one-in-forty chance. Perhaps some pundits know more about what Republican party actors are thinking than I do...but it's also possible that Washington-based pundits are overestimating party support for Romney. I really don't know. But "I don't know" means, I think, that he has a chance, if not a very big one.