How To Cover ACORN

So NYT "Public Editor" Clark Hoyt has now devoted another column to the pressing issue of whether the Times has sufficiently covered ACORN, and whether the insufficient coverage is a sign of a massive liberal bias, or the overcoverage is a sign of a massive conservative bias...oh, it gives you a headache, doesn't it? I don't know -- it strikes me as rather more important that the Times could run a major health care analysis piece based on the erroneous assumption that Massachusetts would fail to fill their Senate vacancy.

At any rate, Hoyt believes that the controversy, such as it is, is about views of whether ACORN is clean or dirty:

The strong reactions suggested how challenging it can be to navigate a polarized world — in this case, Acorn is either a thoroughly corrupt radical organization or an innocent victim of a new McCarthyism — when truth often lies somewhere in the middle.

Hoyt completely misses why conservatives think that ACORN is front page news: for conservatives, ACORN is part of, and a leading part of, a vast conspiracy to bring down capitalism, or the United States, or something like that. And ACORN is important because understanding ACORN "properly" (that is, within the conspiracy mindset) is an important step to proving that Barack Obama really is the wild-eyed anti-American radical that conspiracy-minded conservatives "know" he really is. In other words, this isn't about whether one particular unimportant organization turns out to be corrupt; it's about "palling around with terrorists."

It's not hard to find good quotations to support that, but far better is this cool chart from last fall -- or as Lisa Schiffren put it at NRO, a brilliant diagram -- that "shows" how ACORN, Obama, Soros, and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer caused the financial crisis. I'm sure there's another chart out there someplace showing how ACORN and Obama stole the 2008 election.

Of course, this is all nonsense. Barack Obama is not secretly plotting to bring down capitalism and the United States; he's not controlled by a group of crazed radical terrorists; he's just a mainstream liberal pol. Therefore, whether the ACORN thing is worth covering or not, it just isn't very important in and of itself.

What is worth covering, however, is the extent to which large chunks of the conservative network of activists and commentators have given themselves over to nutty conspiracy thinking. That is a big, and important, story, and one the Times should cover a lot better than it does. I don't think that anyone who gets their news just from the Times would realize the extent to which Bill Ayers remains a central figure for (some) conservatives, or how well-accepted birther junk is for many of these people.

Hoyt does get one thing right: he analogizes ACORN to Blackwater. That's close; if you add Blackwater to Diebold, you get ACORN (and Soros and Ayers). The Times should help its readers understand (1) why some people seem to be so obsessed with these people and organizations, and (2) how important those conspiracy-pushers are within their party networks. That's a big story, and getting it right is important.

Is Newt News?

Steve Benen argues today that news outlets shouldn't treat things that Newt Gingrich says as news:

We're talking about a disgraced, scandal-plagued politician who was forced from public office -- by his own party -- more than a decade ago. What difference does it make if he trashes the president on his Twitter account?

Remember Jim Wright and Tom Foley? They were the House speakers before Gingrich. If they had a few tweets saying supportive things about the White House, would CNN have run an item about their comments, passing them along as self-evidently newsworthy? If the answer is "no," and I think reasonable people would agree that it is, then CNN's piece yesterday is absurd.

Obvious answer: Newt still is, for better or worse, someone treated as a Serious Player by his fellow Republicans, while Wright and Foley certainly are not treated that way by their fellow Democrats.

Now, the real question is which way the causal arrow runs: is Newt taken seriously by Republicans because he's treated as important by the media, or the other way around? The former is problematic, but the latter is entirely healthy. I think most people would agree that we want the parties to pick their leaders, not the news media.

And the evidence, such as it is, supports the idea that the media are following the parties, not the other way around. Bill Clinton is treated as a respected elder statesman, because the Dems treat him that way. Dan Quayle is treated as a washed-up nobody, which is roughly how he's treated by the Republicans. The GOP may be foolish to treat Newt with respect, but that's not for CNN to decide.

A tougher question is whether, how, and how often reporters should remind people of the baggage that Newt brings with him; as Benen says, Newt is a "disgraced, scandal-plagued politician who was forced from public office -- by his own party" (and that's not to mention that he's a total fraud). I don't know that I have an answer to that one. I'm sure liberals would be happy if CNN noted Newt's scandals every time they quoted him...but I'm not sure how happy they'd be if CNN also included Monica Lewinsky in the story about the Big Dog's trip to North Korea. On balance, I'd say that reporters should try to follow the lead of political elites, rather than trying to impose their own judgments in these areas. Since Republicans have apparently decided to pretend that Newt isn't a disgrace and a fraud (or perhaps have forgotten that they once knew those things), I don't see a lot of harm in the networks joining in, at least as long as Newt isn't a candidate for anything.

Friday baseball post

How do you evaluate a GM?

The Giants, with a lucky season that pushed them over .500 after four years in the dumps, are reported to be bringing Brian Sabean back for yet another year (he's been there since 1997), although during the broadcast tonight they said nothing is done yet. At any rate, here's Steven Rubio on the decision:

You could admit that Brian Sabean has some important skills as a GM, and still realize he’s the wrong guy for the Giants at this point in their evolution. The pitching is there, the hitting is not, and Brian Sabean doesn’t know a good hitter from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s smelly ass. He gets credit for some of the young studs on the current team, but he is also the same guy who openly and purposely blew off top draft picks. He’ll have money to spend in 2010, but he doesn’t know what kind of hitter to spend it on, so that’s money he will more than likely waste.

What the team needs from a GM right now is pretty obvious. It’s the same thing they’ve needed for some time, at least since the old-school notions of player evaluation gave way to the new paradigm of analysis. They need a general manager who can make use of all the tools of modern baseball analysis, who can go out and find any dumb fuck who can play first base and hit for at least the league average. They need someone who isn’t impressed because a player is old, who sees beyond batting average and W-L records, someone who understands the value of that most basic of offensive statistics, on-base percentage. They most definitely do not need someone whose idea of fixing an offense is to sign Edgar Renteria, Freddy Sanchez and Ryan Garko, who thinks an Aaron Rowand in his 30s is worth tens of millions of dollars, who will in all likelihood sign Bengie Fucking Molina and his worst-in-the-entire-league OBP to a contract extension. In short, they need the anti-Sabean.

Unfortunately, they’re going with the exact opposite of the anti-Sabean: Sabean himself.

Steven's a bit more intemperate than I am, but then again I only have to listen on to the radio broadcasts. Still, he's exactly right. It's exactly what TNC said in a slightly different context this week about another Bay Area sports team:

I wonder how much of the Raiders decline has to do with professionalization of football. It was obviously always professional. But I wonder if you could get away with a lot more sloppiness, say, 30 years ago.

I don't know enough about football, but I know baseball, and that comment applies perfectly to Sabean and the Giants, and that's what I want to write about a bit. Here's a few bits of evidence:

1. Baseball rosters used to have nooks and crannies. That is, they didn't really need 25 guys, and you heard about guys who hardly ever played (bullpen managers, pinch hitters). You even heard about guys (whether it was true or not) who were there primarily to go drinking with the manager and to spy on the other players for the manager. None of that exists any more; baseball people have figured out how to get maximum use of every roster spot, so much so that teams manipulate the rules to really play with 26 man rosters.

2. All Star Game pitchers used to pitch three inning stints. No more; teams aren't willing to rearrange their rotations to allow it. Thirty years ago, no one worried too much about the fractional loss in expected wins from pushing back the ace by a couple of days; now, even bad teams won't do it.

3. OK, here's the one that Coates was on about. Baseball has a long and distinguished history of crazy owners, who would treat the team as their personal plaything, intervening in even the smallest decisions. Sometimes that worked out well, if the crazy owner cared about winning and made good choices; sometimes, it didn't. But that's all gone now. Just from the expansion era, there were Charles O. Finley, Ted Turner, Bill Veeck, George Steinbrenner...there's nothing like that now, and hasn't been since Steinbrenner and Turner were tamed by the mid-1980s.

And that brings us to Brian Sabean. He does some things very well, but he has just huge blind spots. Not all of them are because he doesn't appear to understand basic modern baseball statistics...he also seems to just rule out a lot of the potential sources of talent (for example, the Giants don't compete for Asian players. Why not? Who knows? As I said, just huge blind spots). Anyway, in 1975, I think that would have worked out just fine. In 2009, the competition is just too fast for a guy like Sabean to be able to keep up.

Or, yet another way to see the problem with Sabean is the old correlation/causation issue. The Giants did very well during Sabean's first several years in San Francisco, from 1997 through 2004. You don't have to be much of a baseball fan to know why: Sabean inherited the best player in baseball, a guy who had probably the best run of anyone since Babe Ruth during Sabean's good years. A smart team would know not to credit Sabean for that, but the Giants don't seem to be a smart team.

He does do some things really well, but others are just so awful that there's just no excuse. And yet, we'll have him to kick around at least another year, it seems. Ugh.

Gerrymandering vs. Funding

Excellent post by Matt Yglesias about gerrymandering. He does takes this a bit too far:

[A]ny district, no matter how gerrymandered, has a median voter and a sufficiently motivated challenger can make a good shot at finding him.

...because voters don't vote (primarily) on ideology; they vote primarily on party, so that in a district full of committed Republicans, capturing the ideological space of the median voter won't actually capture her GOP-loyal vote.

But he's absolutely correct in the main point of his post:

The real issue, I think, is the relative scarcity of campaign funds. If every major party nominee in every House district in America were guaranteed a reasonable sum of public funds with which to conduct his campaign then I think you’d suddenly see all sorts of interesting candidates popping up in “uncompetitive” districts.

Absolutely. And, to push it a little farther, even if many of these interesting candidates ultimately lost (as they would), we'd have more interesting elections and a better democracy. For the system, public financed floors for Congressional candidates is a win-win. (I'm for floors, not ceilings; ceilings have a much more difficult relationship with democracy).

Party Networks, Rush & Co., and the GOP

John Sides has a terrific post up the Monkey Cage laying out some of the theories-of-parties basis for understanding the conflict breaking out in earnest this week between Rush, Glenn Beck, John McCain and his campaign operatives, Lindsey Graham, David Brooks, and others. John's question is:

Do Beck, Limbaugh, and their kindred sit outside of a political party, as Graham suggests, or are they essentially part of a political party?

John talks about two theories of party. For John Aldrich, parties are creatures of office-seekers. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller disagree; from a party network perspective, they see parties as conspiracies of policy-seekers ("intense policy demanders" -- see also Bawn, Cohen, Karol Masket, Noel and Zaller 2005). I'll add to that Hans' comments to John Sides:

I’d say that Beck and Limbaugh are “ideologues.” One thing ideologues do is tie issues together…the way they do influence people is they convince partisans that all of their issues are important ones. So when cultural conservatives start fretting about socialism, that’s coming from the ideological link between social conservatism and economic conservatism.In a pithy diagram,

I’d say ideologues —> policy demanders —> political party platforms.

OK, my turn now. My analysis is also from a party networks perspective, and what I find is that the answer isn't one or the other -- it's both, and more. Parties are made up of all of these things, and other overlapping categories (that is, someone can belong to more than one of these groups). So we have office-seeking politicians; benefit-seeking traditional interest groups; activists, who may be benefit-seekers but might be after more symbolic benefits (such as changes in abortion policy, as opposed to subsidies for a business); campaign and governing professionals, who have their own sets of incentives; party officials and functionaries, who have yet another set of incentives; ideologues; and perhaps others.

In my view, there's nothing inherent in the notion of a political party that determines which of these groups, and which of these sets of incentives, will prevail. Instead, they're all part of the party, and the particular rules of the game, relevant institutions, and political context will determine which sets of incentives predominate for any particular party at any specific time. So with one particular set of institutions, rules, and context you wind up with a party that empowers bureaucratized functionaries, while with another you get a party that empowers classic machine politicians, or lone-wolf entrepreneurs of another type. Sometimes the changes happen by deliberate design, and sometimes the changes happen because technology or other institutions change, or as unintended consequences of poorly thought out deliberate design.

While a real study would need to actually demonstrate it, for a blog post I'm comfortable saying that of course Rush Limbaugh is a member, and an important one at that, of the Republican party (I'm not quite as certain about Beck, but I think more generally Fox News is safely within the Republican network).

Moreover, if my basic idea of parties is correct, then it's certainly possible that in this particular time, with its particular rules of the game and institutions and political context, Republicans have a real problem. There's something about the current situtation that empowers those within the Republican party network who have incentives for the party to lose elections and/or hold nutty beliefs, and minimizes the influence of those who have incentives to win elections and hold reasonable policy views.

Now, what those things are is only, as far as I can see, in the speculation stage. Yes, it's easy to see that Rush is going to maximize his ratings when he says crazy stuff while Democrats are in office. But what is it about parties right now, or at least Republicans right now, that tends to empower Rush & Co. at the expense of, say, doctors (as a policy-seeking GOP-leaning group), or politicians (as an office-seeking GOP group). Or, what is it that causes some of those groups to act contrary to the roles we would expect them to play, like the Chamber of Commerce preferring fact-denying ideology at the expense of the interests of its members, or Joe Wilson preferring the benefits of controversy, even at the very possible cost of his House seat.

Those are the questions that, in my view, party scholars would be smart to be answering.

History Much, John Weaver?

More on the fascinating news today and yesterday about feuding in the GOP, but first, a little bit of fun: here's McCainite John Weaver on McCain's attempts to steer the party in his direction:

“John remains the titular head of the Republican Party and he will be until there’s a new nominee,” he said. “Most of the people that ran and lost you never heard from again,” he said. “He’s not going to be like Ed Muskie or Hubert Humphrey.”

Hmmm....let's start with Muskie. Ed Muskie was a VP nominee in 1968, sought the Democratic nomination in 1972, and was drummed out of the race relatively early (thanks in part to Nixon's efforts to use dirty tricks to undermine strong Democratic candidates). He was never a nominee, and therefore seems pretty irrelevant to the point. At any rate, Muskie continued in the Senate for the rest of the 1970s, eventually serving briefly as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State in 1980. As far as I know, his service in the Senate was reasonably distinguished in the 1970s, although I think his real achievements preceded his failed presidential run.

Hubert Humphrey? Well, Humphrey was the Democratic nominee in 1968. After he lost, he then...ran again for president, in 1972, and was just barely defeated for the nomination by George McGovern. After that, he returned to the Senate, passed the Humphrey-Hawkins employment bill, ran for (and lost) for majority leader, considered running again for president in 1976 (and was widely seen as a serious possibility, although my memory on this is that most Democrats thought his time had passed by then). He was, throughout the last decade of his life, a major figure in the Democratic Party. Here's Wikipedia:

On October 25, 1977, he addressed the Senate, and on November 3, 1977, Humphrey became the first person other than a member of the House or the president to address the House of Representatives in session. President Carter honored him by giving him command of Air Force One for his final trip to Washington on October 23. One of Humphrey's speeches contained the lines "It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped," which is sometimes described as the "liberals' mantra."

Hey, good luck to McCain and all, but his pre-nomination political career wasn't a tenth of Humphrey's (and that's awful generous), and I'll be astonished if he's anywhere near as well-known and important as "never heard of again" Hubert Humphrey was after being his party's nominee.

More on GOP Troubles (and 2010/1994)

Lots of stuff stirring on the topic I blogged a bit about yesterday -- the sad state of the GOP.

Via Ambinder, this David Brooks column draws the obvious (to me at least) conclusions:

[T]he saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist. They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

Brooks frames it around an idea of foolish GOP pols falling for a conspiracy of Dem pols and the liberal media to build up Rush & Co., but I guess I sort of hope that's just a device to get Republicans to listen. In fact, even if "Rush's ghosts" don't dominate voting booths, I do think he downplays their direct influence a bit. No, Rush by himself can't get people to flood the Democratic primaries to support Clinton in order to bloody Obama, but that's asking a lot. I do think that there's probably some direct influence in Republican primaries, and I'm certain that talk show hosts, cable news talkers, and bloggers can generate the kind of buzz that fuels campaign donations (especially at sub-presidential levels, where there are fewer other influences).

As far as overall effect, though, we have some good graphs today from Brendan Nyhan and from Ezra Klein showing just how poorly the GOP is doing. (Not that all of that is a Beck effect; more than anything, it's the Bush presidency, and there are presumably a variety of factors). Ezra says he's "not enough of an election wonk to know how that plays out," so I'll let him get back to figuring out what's going on in the bill-combining factories and then explaining it to us, and I'll give it a shot:

1. How the incumbents are perceived is generally going to be more important than how the out-party is perceived.

2. How the incumbents are perceived is going to be driven more by events (especially the economy, but also a general sense of how Obama is doing) than by what the out-party says.

3. The main positive thing that the out-party can do is to field lots of good candidates and get the lots of money. Odds are that Rush & Co. help with the latter, and if they can create an impression that a good GOP year is coming, they can help with the former.

4. All of these "generally" type things assume that the out-party doesn't put itself outside the reach of normal voters in the middle. Most of the time that's a safe assumption. It is possible that Republicans are putting themselves into a hole in which they violate that assumption, either nationally as a party, or (more likely) in lots of individual seats. I think it's fairly unlikely that the overall unpopularity of the Republican party will hurt them much, especially in an off-year election, but I think it's increasingly difficult for Republicans to nominate the kinds of normal good candidates who can take advantage of opportunity.

5. At the moment, the important thing to remember is that (Cook notwithstanding) Barack Obama is not an unpopular president, and the Democrats are not taking the bulk of the blame for the bad economy.

All told, I don't see any real sign out there of a major electoral uprising against the Democrats in 2010, but for the most part that's not because of the (very real) troubles that Republicans find themselves in.