Join Us At the Picnic 2

Marc Ambinder elaborates on his suggestion that Pawlenty skip Iowa, and I still don't buy it.

Yes, caucuses favor extreme candidates, and that isn't likely to be Pawlenty's strength. But it's not as if Iowa is an outlier; the Republican electorate overall is likely to support candidates they perceive as very conservative in 2012. That's not great luck for Pawlenty.

But Pawlenty doesn't have to win in Iowa to be viable. He just has to get some traction there -- partially in order to keep other candidates from gaining traction. If Pawlenty passes and the field finishes, say, Palin/Romney/Huck in Iowa, then how is Pawlenty, who enters the 2012 cycle with very little national exposure at all, going to finish better than third in New Hampshire? And if Romney and Palin finish 1-2, in whichever order, in Iowa and New Hampshire, is there any reason to think that Pawlenty can suddenly leapfrog them to win in South Carolina? Meanwhile, if Romney and Pawlenty skip Iowa, which one is likely to get more national media attention leading up to New Hampshire -- the one who is already nationally known, or the one who is nationally still very obscure?

Yes, it's apt to be very difficult for someone who movement conservatives don't like to win in Iowa, but only because it's going to be difficult for someone who movement conservatives don't like to win the nomination. As so many candidates have learned, however, you get nominated by competing not by waiting for the perfect state to run in.

I just can't see any logic at all for skipping Iowa for anyone but the most well-known and most well-funded frontrunners -- and even then, I think it's very, very risky.

Barack Houdini

OK: the most important point, before I start this, is that it really, really, really, doesn't matter whether Barack Obama's approval rating in the Gallup daily tracking poll is at 50% or 49% on any particular day. The entire consequence of falling to 49%, as compared to falling to 50%, is that there will be one mini-cycle of stories that practically no one with an open mind will even notice (since people who follow politics most closely are also the most committed partisans).

Nevertheless...

Obama first hit 50% on Gallup in their August 24-26 polling, sparking a story about when presidents typically fall below 50. Actually, the story was written when he was at 51%...and then he hit 50. And stayed right there, for four consecutive days, before climbing back to the relative safety of 51%. He has stayed stuck in the low 50s ever since, returning to exactly 50 in the polling periods beginning on September 22, October 3, and then October 17 and 18. In fact, his Gallup approval average for the entire quarter was 53%, but not a single one of the ninety reported measurements fell lower than 50%. One cannot compute the odds of that (since we don't know whether the true average stayed at 53% over the three months or jumped around some), but I think it's safe to say that the odds are long. It's good to be lucky!

At any rate, Obama has "spiked" back up to 54% in today's report, if you can call a four-point swing a spike. His high since he first dropped to 50% approval has been 56%, and in fact since mid-July his high has been 58%, so at least in the Gallup numbers he's basically been flat for a bit over three months. See also pollster.com, which has Obama falling until mid-August and then flat, depending on which settings are used.

Two complaints to Gallup, by the way. First, their headline, "Obama Sees Approval Slide in His Third Quarter," is technically accurate but misleading; his approval fell in his second quarter, and was stable (at the new lower level) in the third quarter. Second, their front-page graph is scaled in order to make very small changes look significant. No surprise -- they've switched from polling every two weeks or so to a constant daily track, and so they need to sell it. I love the daily track; political scientists always think that more data is always a good thing. But the downside is that we're apt to get a lot of noise misinterpreted as something more than that, and I think Gallup has a responsibility to do what they can to minimize that.

Counting Senate Votes on Health Care, Again

Steve Benen's reporting and comments on the politics of health care reform have been very useful, but I do want to clarify something in his analysis today. Benen says:

Every time a center-right member of the Senate Democratic caucus says something discouraging about health care reform, there's always a key caveat: their votes on cloture matter more than their votes on the bill. Just so long as these "Conservadems" oppose a Republican filibuster that would block consideration of the bill, they can vote however they please on the legislation itself.

That's right, but only up to a point. I'm going to try to lay this out, but it really is a little complicated...I said I wanted to clarify it, but really all I can do is just lay how how tricky it all is.

Let's simplify by supposing that a Senator is either for or against a particular version of a public option. And let's also suppose that the Senator supports a bill without a public option, which appears to be the case for all sixty Democrats in the Senate.

The question becomes: how strongly does a Senator oppose the public option? There are actually a range of answers, or at least behaviors corresponding to those answers. I'll call them categories one through four:

1. Mildly opposed. Such a Senator would vote for a bill including the public option, vote for cloture on a bill including public option, and demand no separate vote on public option -- although she would vote against the public option should an amendment offering such a choice comes to a vote.

2. More strongly opposed. That Senator would still vote yes/yes on the bill with a public option and cloture for that bill, but might demand a chance to vote against the public option in a separate amendment.

3. Even more strongly opposed. A Senator with this position would be a yes/no vote (what Benen is talking about), voting yes on cloture and no on the bill. Furthermore, he might insist on the separate vote in exchange for the yes vote on final passage cloture.

4. Totally opposed: no on cloture, no on the bill, if it contains a public option.

Got that? Now multiply each of those times the different types of public options: the "strong" public option (the Rockefeller amendment in the Finance Committee), the "weak" public option (Schumer amendment), either of these with an opt-out, either of these with an opt-in, either of these with a trigger, strong or weak with an opt-out and a trigger...you get the picture.

Now, the very good news for the bill is that there don't seem to be any category four Democratic Senators: no on cloture (and the bill), except for the strongest versions of the public option.

It is also pretty clear, from the Finance Committee votes and from reporting, that the weakest of the public option compromises would have at least 50 category two votes (yes/yes, but asking for a separate vote). That means that some version of the public option is viable.

The difficulty, then, is that as the negotiators move to stronger public options, the possibility of a large pool of category three Senators (yes/no) opens up. Benen has Landrieu and Pryor potentially in that category. The question, then, is how many others might be there, and the problem is that it might be quite a few. Looking here, Landrieu is currently the 9th and Pryor the 18th least liberal Democrat. Now, two of the top ten, Byrd and Feingold, should be safe yes/yes votes, but there are a lot of potential category threes here, including the Nelsons, Lincoln, Conrad, Tester, Hagan, Bayh, McCaskill, Begich, Bennet, and of course Lieberman. They can't, that is, all vote yes/no, because the bill won't actually get to 50.

OK so far? Bottom line to this point: it's not quite right that securing 60 for cloture will be enough, because there could be too many yes/no votes, which gives you cloture but not passage. That's the clarification I spoke about up top...getting 60 for cloture isn't necessarily enough. The bill needs 60/50: at least sixty for cloture, with at least 50 for passage (with Biden breaking the tie).

I hate to complicate things further, but there's yet another potential problem. Feel free to skip this next paragraph and just substitute "it's even more complicated" for the substance of it.

If you're still with me, the added complexity is the category two group (yes/yes on passage, but only if they get to cast an amendment vote against the public option before voting for a bill including the public option). On the face of it, that's a perfectly logically defensible position. Except -- what if that group is larger than ten? As everyone has said (here's a good explanation by Ezra Klein), there's a huge advantage for any provision that gets included in the version of the bill that goes to the floor, because it would take sixty votes to remove it. After all, bill supporters could filibuster the amendment to strip a public plan from the bill. Unless...the price for the yes/yes vote is a vote on the amendment, and not just a vote on cloture on the amendment, to strip the public plan out. Call it the strong version of category two, or 2A, or whatever. And here's the real kicker. Some of those in category two on the Senate bill may be category three (yes/no) on the conference report, with (presumably) a stronger public option. They will want to go back to their states and say that they're "real" vote was against the bill (even though they voted for cloture), but if that's their position, then it might be a tough sell (logically, at least) to say they "really" voted against the public option when all they really did was vote for cloture on an amendment to kill the public option, before eventually voting for a (Senate version) bill with a public option.

I hope I got that right. I'm not going back to check.

OK, back to the main point. To begin with, the odds of getting a bill remain very good. As it's seemed for weeks, there appear to be enough votes in the Senate for at least a weak public option. The trick for Harry Reid is to push for the strongest public option he can get (in order to keep liberals happy) without jeopardizing 60/50.

Oh, and note that preferences might not be linear; Senators might not actually agree about which of the various compromises available are weaker or stronger. And some Senators may not care very much at all about the specifics, but take the opportunity to bargain with Reid (and/or the White House) for some unrelated goodies.

All of which only means that there's a lot of hard work needed to make these things come together.

Dogs, Not Barking

1. Term limits. I'd expected Republicans to rediscover term limits as the obvious solution to all the ills of the republic on about January 3, 2007, and yet here we are well into the second Democratic Congress and still little or nothing from Republicans about how those evil Dems won't allow a vote on Congressional term limits.

2. Georgia. Perhaps I've missed some news, but all seems quiet enough...looking around, I find this Robert Kagan prediction: "Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell." Well, history is long, but so far I'd say Massie and Yglesias are looking just a wee bit better than Kagan on that one. At any rate, I'm fairly sure Russia hasn't launched any major invasions recently.

3. Hey, where's Betsy? I know, Betsy McGaughey is presumably still pushing her death panels, but shouldn't she (or some other else) invent something new for the floor battles? And not just accounting stuff -- no one cares about that. I'm expecting something to match the creativity of gay marriage opponents in Maine, and I haven't heard it yet. Is Betsy really good for only one whopper per health care fight?

4. And, of course, the Fairness Doctrine.

Transformers

Ezra Klein has a fun, short, post in which he observes that individual Members of Congress actually matter quite a bit when it comes to writing laws:

In theory, that's obvious. Bills don't come from the Bill Fairy. They come from senators and congressmen. But watching it up close is really striking. Kent Conrad spends a weekend chatting with his staff and suddenly co-ops are on the agenda. John Kerry's staff finds something like the excise tax proposal in an old document from 1994 and suddenly that's how the Senate Finance Committee is funding health-care reform...

This is how bills get made. Congressmen don't simply act as vessels for existing ideas that have a broad level of elite consensus. Fairly frequently, they -- or their staffs, or their lobbyist contacts, or their policy advisers -- simply have a new idea, and within a week or two, that idea becomes central to the process.

Absolutely correct -- except for the "obvious" part. It's not obvious at all; it's actually highly unusual, by world standards. Our legislature (both Houses!) is "transformative," but mostly what you see in the world are legislatures that have only a few main active functions: electing the government, ratifying what the government does, and (if things go wrong) kicking out the government. Individual members of those legislatures don't write laws -- they generally don't draft amendments, or negotiate the fine points. Instead, members of the government (who are, most systems, technically members of parliament but function more or less similarly to our Department Secretaries) decide on a policy, and then have the bureaucrats write the laws to enact those policies. Negotiations that take place in such systems tend to be directly between group elites and the government. They do not involve individual members of the legislature.

The virtues of the systems that the rest of the world have is that they tend to be more systematic and more professional. You wouldn't get something like Kent Conrad misreading a book and deciding that French health care is a perfect example of the value of co-ops, or whatever it was he thought he understood, and then all of a sudden everyone has to deal with that.

The virtues of the American system are that it tends to be far more open and decentralized, and it is far less bureaucratic. A lot of people are close enough or can get close enough to one of the 535 Members of Congress that they can have some input (well, actually, while all 100 Senators are relevant and close to equal, far fewer Members of the House are potential authors of any particular bill, with majority party status and committee position both large factors). In my view, that makes it more democratic.

The other major issue raised is majoritarianism. The type of system in which Conrad, Kerry, Olympia Snowe, Max Baucus, Ron Wyden, Henry Waxman, and perhaps dozens of other Members of Congress can all write bits of the health care bill tends to be strongly anti-majoritarian, whereas the way most other democracies do things tends to be strongly majoritarian. Each has its supporters (and perhaps different systems are better suited for different polities). I'll consistently take an anti-majoritarian position, so I'm pretty happy with what Ezra notices. In my view, a transformative Congress with individual Members of Congress having real independent ability to affect policy is one of the hallmarks of American democracy, one of the things that makes the U.S. "really" democratic.

(Update: I forgot to mention one excellent study of which Members of Congress have mattered, and how -- David Mayhew's America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich).

The Senate: Really Old, Staying That Way

I just watched a quick little tribute on the Senate floor to Dan Inouye, who apparently passed Ted Kennedy today to become the third longest serving Senator, behind Strom Thurmand and Robert Byrd. You'll notice that three of these served in the current Senate. In fact, aging Senators is a big trend over the last several electoral cycles. CRS reports that "the average age of Senators at the beginning of the 111th Congress was 63.1 years," and that's a full three years older than the beginning of the 109th Congress, which was the oldest Senate ever and the first to break 60 (see below for data details).

Is there any chance for the Senate to start getting younger?

I'll start with the post-election changes, with current ages:

IL Obama (48) -> Burris (72)
DE Biden (66) -> Kaufman (70)
NY Clinton (61) -> Gillibrand (42)
CO Salazar (54) -> Bennet (44)
FL Martinez (62) -> LeMieux (40)
MA Kennedy (77) -> Kirk (71)

Adding that up, that's a decrease of a total of 29 years. Unfortunately, the other 94 Senators will have, over the course of the year and assuming no other changes, aged by an aggregate of 94 years, and all 100 will, if there are no further changes, age another year before the Congress ends. However, there is one certain change in the works, with Kirk (71) to be replaced soon. The frontrunner, Martha Coakley, is 56.

How about the prospects for the 112th Senate?

Here are the retirements so far, again with current age:
Burris (72)
Kaufman (70)
LeMieux (40)
Brownback (53)
Bunning (77)
Bond (60)
Gregg (52)
Voinovich (73)
Hutchison (66; she is supposedly retiring early, but we'll see)

This is not good news at all for those who want a less aged Senate. The average age of the retiring Senators is only 62.6, just barely older than the Senate as a whole. Meanwhile, Senators Leahy, Inouye, Mikulski, McCain, Shelby, and Bennett (UT), all well over the Senate average, appear to be shoe-ins for re-elections to six more years (most of this group will be over 80 by January 2017).

I'm strongly against term limits, and I think that experience is a good thing in Congress...but I would like to see a lot more Senators in their 30s and 40s, and a lot fewer over 75.



Notes: I don't have a copy of Vital Statistics on Congress at hand, but I don't know that they have data on Senator age, and on line versions of CRS reports only seem to go back to the 107th Congress. CRS's reports sometimes say that the then-current Senate is the oldest ever, but they also sometimes say it's the among the oldest ever, or the oldest in at least X years, or the oldest since they start having data (early 20th century), so it's a bit confusing. Also, it wasn't clear whether Al Franken, who was 57 in January and 58 when he took office, was included in the CRS calculation (Norm Coleman, who is almost two years older than Franken, was not included; different parts of the report refer to either 99 or 100 Senators, so I don't know which was used in the age calculation). The average age sentence in the CRS report talks about the beginning of the Senate, which would include Biden, Clinton, and Salazar (and Martinez and Kennedy) but leave Illinois vacant; again, I don't know what they chose to do, and I'm not energetic enough to run the numbers myself).

Also, all the numbers I ran just used whole-number age today (I ignored, for example, that two of the Senators mentioned have birthdays tomorrow, October 23). I have no idea how CRS calculated their score.

Palin Time (Not A Python Reference)

I'm pretty sure it says absolutely nothing good about me whatsoever that this news makes me just a little bit giddy. I do love a good Sarah Palin story, and November is going to be Palinerific. Palinsational. Palintastic.