Opinion on Torture

The political science journal PS: Political Science and Politics has, in its new issue, a symposium on terrorism and human rights, with seven articles -- and they've made it freely available (via, by the way, John Sides at the Monkey Cage -- I haven't received my issue, yet).   From the editor's introduction:

Can governments prevent terrorism while also respecting human rights, or must authorities trade off some human rights to reduce terrorism?  If the latter is the case, which human rights can or should be sacrificed for the goal of stopping terrorism?

I've only read one article so far, on public opinion and torture.  John Sides sums it up nicely, so I'll send you there for that.  The interesting, and certainly depressing, part of their data is that public opinion, after opposing torture throughout the Bush administration, is now moving in favor of torture (although only in limited ways, and based on limited data).  The last two polls reported in the article, from June and November 2009, showed slim majorities favoring torture.  As I check, pollingreport.com doesn't list any new polls since then. 

The article focuses on the question of why people believe(d) that there was strong support for torture despite polling that showed otherwise.  I think they have a good argument, but I think that the article understates the changes in the rhetoric surrounding torture over the years -- a change that regular readers of the news know about, but which as far as I know has not really been carefully documented.  Remember, before the revelations about Abu Ghraiib in spring 2004, there was really no public hint of American torture.  The debate -- and there was a debate, since otherwise no one would have polled on the question -- was discussed as if it was hypothetical: if there was a ticking bomb situation, then was torture OK; Jack Bauer and "24" had debuted in November 2001. 

The next phase, after Abu Ghraib, also evoked close to unanimity.  Almost everyone agreed that the story of Abu Ghraib was one of horrible abuse; the question was whether it was, as the president and other high administration officials maintained, a case of a few misbehaving soldiers, or whether higher-ups were responsible as well.  Again, I'm relying on memory here, but while if I recall correctly there was a bit, around the fringes, of talk about how Abu Ghraib wasn't quite as bad as all that, for the most part anyone taking opinion leadership from the White House would have strongly opposed torture in 2004. 

Only after that, as more and more was revealed, was opinion leadership more ambiguous.  In 2004, it was perfectly possible to fully support George W. Bush while fully opposing torture.  Over the next couple of years, much of the conservative response to revelations of torture consisted of denial, not defense; this was all just liberal media exaggerations.  It took time for Republicans in and out of government to shift to an (almost) full defense of torture, although there was still a split between defending specific actions and defending the general category of torture, which was still strongly denounced by the president.  That's the context of the notorious decision of the New York Times and others to avoid describing actions by Americans as torture.

By 2008, the only way to fully support George W. Bush was to oppose torture but to either ignore the vast evidence of what the United States had done, or to oppose torture but define it narrowly to exclude virtually everything that had every been considered to be torture.  And after the election, the emphasis shifted again, and while few have explicitly said that "torture" per se is good, the disclaimers are increasingly, as far as I can see, less and less prominent.  The old debate about whether the revelations were true, a very live debate through the middle of Bush's second term, is long gone, and explicit torture supporters (explicit in supporting everything but the actual word) dominate conservative discussion of the issue.

What I'd emphasize here is just how recent all this is, and how well the data described in the article match changes in opinion leadership.  The authors find virtually no change in support for torture from late 2001 through about 2005, followed by gradual gains for support of torture beginning in around 2006 and continuing through last year. I agree with the authors' conclusions of where we are now:

We believe that torture may have become a partisan symbol, distinguishing Republicans from Democrats, that demonstrates hawkishness on national security in the same way that being supportive of the death penalty indicates that a person is tough on crime.

I continue to believe that this was preventable, and reflects a serious error by the Obama Administration.  There are many prominent Republicans who (almost certainly) share the traditional American consensus about torture, and there are steps Obama could have taken to amplify their voices, and to marginalize the torture apologists.  Of course, prominent Republican opponents of torture bear a heavy responsibility as well.  They could have spoken up, regardless of the consequences to their own careers within the party.  They could still speak up now.

The Debate Questions? Fair

There's an early consensus that, in the words of Jonathan Chait, "Obama enjoyed friendly questions from an audience that obviously leaned left" in the second debate. Naturally, conservatives agree. I thought the questions favored Obama during the debate, but a second look convinced me that it's wrong: the questions were about as fair as it gets.

From the "Town Hall" audience questions, I count three that were solidly pro-Obama and one that was somewhat pro-Obama; three solidly pro-Romney and one somewhat pro-Romney; and three neutral ones.

So, why the false impression? I think it was because of the sequence; the three great questions for Obama were the third, fourth, and fifth questions overall, and there was no similar sustained block of pro-Romney questions to break the illusion. What's more, Obama was doing a better job overall, which made good Romney questions seem less biting and good Obama questions more obvious. But at any rate, it was an illusion.

Okay, the breakdown (transcript here). I'll start with the great ones for Obama: one that challenged Romney to detail which deductions he would get rid of for middle class voters; one on the topic of pay equity for women; and one which challenged Romney to differentiate himself from George W. Bush. Now, there's really no excuse for Romney not having a great answered prepared for the two challenge questions -- he did not -- but I think it's fair to call those questions which Barack Obama should have been happy to hear.

But they were matched by three great ones for Romney. First, an energy question:

Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?

Later, and parallel to the Romney/Bush question, a challenge that Obama's presidency has been a disappointment:

Mr. President, I voted for you in 2008. What have you done or accomplished to earn my vote in 2012? I'm not that optimistic as I was in 2012. Most things I need for everyday living are very expensive.

As with Bush/Romney, that's one that sets up well for a strong comeback, but it still frames the Obama presidency exactly how Romney and Paul Ryan have often framed it.

The third one was the Libya question:

We were sitting around talking about Libya, and we were reading and became aware of reports that the State Department refused extra security for our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to the attacks that killed four Americans. Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?

Not only could Romney not have asked for better wording, but he also should have been thrilled that there was only one foreign policy question asked the whole time -- and that one question was on Libya. Of course, in the event, this question was Romney's most talked-about botch, but it wasn't because of the question.

I scored two questions as marginally useful, one for each campaign. The gun control question probably was asked by a liberal (the question was about banning "assault weapons"), but it was asked as a challenge to Obama, and it's generally a topic which Republicans would much rather see raised. On the other hand was the question on immigration, which is a topic thought in this cycle to favor Democrats. So one question each which somewhat favored the candidate.

And three questions seemed neutral to me. The final question was about misperceptions of the candidates, and was clearly neutral. Then there were two questions about jobs. The very first question was about the bleak outlook for jobs for college graduates; late in the debate one of the undecided voters asked about outsourcing. One could score the overall topic as good for Romney, but given how central jobs is to the campaign, two questions on the topic seems pretty reasonable, and neither was framed in any particular partisan way. "The outsourcing of American jobs overseas has taken a toll on our economy. What plans do you have to put back and keep jobs here in the United States?"

So three great questions for each candidate, one good one for each (although both asked from a liberal point of view), and three neutral ones, albeit two which were basically on turf Romney wants to be on. I'm open to anyone who wants to challenge my characterizations, but I just don't see it. Whatever the makeup of the undecided voters, the questions Candy Crowley chose from them seemed about as balanced as it could get.

Perry Out

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.

Stupid...Or Super-Genius?

What would torture apologists and Cheneyites such as Marc Theissen and Andy McCarthy say if Barack Obama actually managed to capture and/or kill Osama bin Laden, after the Bush administration failed to do so for eight years?  That's a tough one!  I think it's the context, however, of what Adam Serwer calls "stupid" ideas that McCarthy spouts in an interview excerpted by Conor Friedersdorf.

I mean, think about it.  What would they say if bin Laden is killed on Obama's watch?  I can think of a few lines of attack...


1.  The credit should go to Bush: it was information obtained from torture during the Bush administration that allowed the new team to benefit, even as they dismantled the methods that worked so well.  Problem: first of all, it's highly unlikely that there will be any evidence for the connection; second, the longer into the new administration, the less plausible this attack will be.

2.  bin Laden doesn't matter, and al-Qaeda is still winning.  This one has the disadvantage of being far too responsible.  It's only a half step away from the fully responsible step of praising the president for the good and attacking him for the bad. 

3.  The Theissen thesis: killing them is much worse than capturing them.  McCarthy endorses this brand of lunacy, but recognizes it's small potatoes, and not really useful if the big cheese himself is killed.

4.  Really, what else?  I couldn't have thought of anything. 

But then...I'm no Andy McCarthy:

These days, the vibrant debate in Islamist circles — the circles Obama has courted assiduously — is over whether al-Qaeda has outlived its usefulness, at least when it comes to attacking our homeland. Many Islamist thinkers believe the Islamist movement is making such progress marching through our institutions (and Europe’s) that terrorist attacks at this point are a tactical blunder. They cause a blowback effect that retards the progress of what Robert Spencer aptly calls the “stealth jihad.”

Don’t get me wrong: The Islamists are still supportive of terrorist aims, and they still applaud al-Qaeda’s attacks on American troops operating in Muslim countries. (We don’t seem to get this, but even if we think we are doing humanitarian service, Islamist ideology construes sharia to condemn as acts of war attempts to plant Western ideas and institutions in Islamic countries, and to call for violent jihad in response.) But the Brotherhood and the Saudis will sing no sad songs if the U.S. kills bin Laden or crushes al-Qaeda. In Muslim countries, they’ll use it as propaganda against us; in the West, they’ll pretend that they always condemned terrorism (they do that now — even as they urge the destruction of Israel and attacks against American troops). So Obama knows the Islamists he wants to engage have decided al-Qaeda is expendable. He won’t lose any ground with them by smashing al-Qaeda.

Got that?  By killing al-Qaeda leaders -- by possibly killing bin Laden -- Obama is actively following Islamist plans. 

This isn't stupid; it's genius.  McCarthy's plan is foolproof; it covers not only a lucky shot that hits bin Laden, but a complete victory over al-Qaeda.  All part of Barack Obama's treasonous treachery.  Notice, by the way, that it's only a "vibrant debate in Islamist circles."  Nice touch; if by some chance Obama curtails the drone strikes, or is in any way defeated by bin Laden, then that will presumably prove that the "vibrant debate" was decided in favor of al-Qaeda, and Obama acted accordingly.

Granted, as policy, it's insane.  But as a creative effort to invent a story of liberal Democratic malfeasance that can be spoon-fed to those who want such things, it's a pretty amazing accomplishment. 

Presidents for the Fourth 6

I did overrated, so I guess it's time to talk about underrated presidents in the new Siena College survey experts.

Once again, I'll just by looking at the other similar surveys.  Who does worse by Siena than they do elsewhere?

Start with Ronald Reagan, who Siena has at #18 (he was at 17 last time around for them, in 2002)..  Reagan's been doing a bit better than that in other surveys...he's been around 10th in most of these things over the last fifteen years.  Siena has William McKinley at #21, about half a dozen spots lower than the other surveys.  Neither Siena nor last year's CSPAN survey like Rutherford Hayes very much (#31 and #33); Hayes usually comes in mid-20s.  That one seems like the flip side of moving Grant up, no?  And Siena is down on Benjamin Harrison, placing him at #34 while most others have him at or above #30. 

Who do I think is underrated?  Well, I've already said that I think putting Washington at #4 is awful -- comparisons are tricky enough that I'm not going to complain if he's #3, but I usually place him right at the top -- and yes, I see a very large gap between the third and fourth spots, so I think putting any of Washington, Lincoln, or FDR fourth or lower is a major mistake.

Who else?  Siena places George H.W. Bush at #22, and Gerald Ford at #28.  I think both of these men, neither of whom I think was really cut out to be a president, could both be a bit higher.  Bush really was a conservative, interested in preserving the status quo and managing necessary change wisely.  That worked well for him in the major events of his presidency, the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union.  It worked out less-well in the Middle East, especially, I think, with respect to Iraq, and it generally worked out badly for him with regard to the economy, where Bush will get credit from deficit hawks for long-term responsible management, but he did little about short-term suffering.  I also think Bush...well, he wasn't quite a demagogue, but I think that he really didn't have much commitment to democracy.  That he's remembered for looking at his watch during his debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992 is appropriate: he never gave much indication that he cared what ordinary people thought about things, apparently having as little regard for the activists and grass-roots interest within his own party has he had for those of the other party. 

The things is: the events in Europe was really very important, and one can imagine all sorts of ways they could have gone wrong; Bush deserves, in my view, enormous credit for it.  He's hurt in these sorts of ratings because ideological conservatives -- or should I say "conservatives" -- have decided to give Ronald Reagan all the credit for the end of the Cold War.  I may do a separate item about Reagan, but for now I'll just say that to me, everyone from Ike through Reagan was just carrying out the strategy established during the Truman administration, so if anyone gets credit for winning the Cold War is should be Truman.  Bush, however, had a very different and difficult challenge, and I've never seen an argument against giving him very high marks for it.

As for Ford: it's hard to think of anyone else who had worse luck in the situation he inherited.  A mess of an economy, the last stages of losing a war, a Congress completely aligned against him, and his predecessor and half his administration in legal trouble.  And, of course, no president has ever taken office with less of a mandate from the people.  Sure, mandates are largely fictional, but sometimes fiction helps.  Let's just say that there wasn't anyone in Congress who even considered the possibility that he owed his election to Gerald Ford.  Given all that, I think Ford acquitted himself reasonably well. 

Of course, with Ford, all anyone is really focused on is the pardon.  I think it was the right thing to do; I think that the trial of Richard Nixon would, in fact, have consumed the nation.  Nixon famously tried to argue that one year of Watergate was enough, and he was wrong about that as long as he was in office, but once he was gone I think there's a fair argument to be made that two years of Watergate was, in fact, enough.  Yes, Nixon richly deserved prison, but the nation deserved a functioning political system, and the pardon helped that to happen.  So overall, on Ford, I think he did well with what he faced, and that's really all anyone can ask of a president.

The Missing Famous Town Hall Debate Moment

The most famous Town Hall debate moment, as far as I can tell, came from the first time the format was used; it was the woman who asked George H.W. Bush how the deficit affected him personally (Adam Serwer talked about it today, thus providing proof that it's famous).

But the other famous Town Hall debate moment should have been the startling one just four years ago, well into the age when you would think that nothing like this could happen unnoticed on TV with everyone watching. I've mentioned it before, but I bet you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? It's about John McCain.

Here's what happened:

The first question of the debate was asked by an older white guy named Alan who asked a general question about the economy -- nothing about his personal situation at all, just a general question about how the candidates would help the economy. Both candidates answer. The follow-up from the moderator, Tom Brokaw, asks the candidates for their choices for Treasury Secretary. So there's been a fair amount of talk since the first question. The second question, then, is asked by a young African American man, who asks how the "bailout package" -- TARP -- would actually help people. McCain launches into an answer on Freddie and Fannie, but eventually gets around to this:

So this rescue package means that we will stabilize markets, we will shore up these institutions. But it's not enough. That's why we're going to have to go out into the housing market and we're going to have to buy up these bad loans and we're going to have to stabilize home values, and that way, Americans, like Alan, can realize the American dream and stay in their home.

It was absolutely shocking, or at least I found it shocking (if you want a more complete retelling, I got my brother to write about it at the time in my pre-blogging days; the NYT transcript is here).

There's simply nothing at all in either question to indicate that "Alan" but not the black guy (Oliver) would want to "realize the American dream and stay in [his] home." Neither even asked about housing, much less talked about their own situations. And yet McCain, while looking at Oliver and answering his question, referred back to the white guy when he wanted to talk about the American dream and home ownership. (If you want to see it on the video, the question is at the 10:00 point and "Americans, like Alan" is at about the 12:00 mark -- more than nine minutes after Alan had sat down after asking his question). It's worth seeing; McCain begins by answering the question directly to Oliver, then starts moving around the debate area while he's talking generally about housing and attacking Obama, and then returns to speaking directly to Oliver when he gets to this bit (and gestures back to Alan; he's clearly not just confusing the names) -- there's really no other way to read it than that he's specifically telling this African American man that the American dream is the property of white guys.

Forget about what it says about John McCain; I'm still shocked, four years later, that the press didn't pick up on it. Did reporters notice and just not care? Did they not think it was significant? Did they not notice?

As I said, this really should be a famous debate moment.

(Updated to include that McCain was clearly not confusing the two names)

Balancing Act

I strongly agree with Matt Yglesias on his comments about deficit reduction. In fact, I'd make a stronger claim: politicians are always safe assuming that no one cares about the deficit.

First of all, to the extent that deficits matter at all, the effect is indirect and shared by everyone, but tax increases and spending cuts are direct and affect some more than others. You're always going to get more intensity on the side that has specific, visible, complaints.

But I think the more important reason is that pretty much no one understands what the deficit is. Political junkies massively overestimate the extent to which mass publics understand public policy in general, and I'm sure that the deficit is high on the list of things that most voters just don't care enough to understand the basic issue (as opposed to things such as war, torture, abortion, jobs, or health care, which at least on some level are pretty concrete).

The best example of this is the famous Town Hall presidential debate from 1992, in which President G.H.W. Bush was totally stumped by an ordinary citizen who demanded to know how the deficit affected him personally. The clip is worth watching for a bunch of reasons: for Bush as a politician in a bubble; for Bush's classic watch check, right at the start of the clip; for Bush's wacky talking style (damn, she's black...must mention AME church...oops, why am I talking about this?); for Clinton's mastery of the format; and to marvel at an America that invited a crazy guy to debate with the major party nominees for president (alas, the clip here edits out his crazy-guy comments). But it's also notable, if you go about 50 seconds in, that the ordinary citizen has no idea what she's talking about. "Deficit" for her seems to mean the recession (as the moderator guesses), or maybe the economy in general, or maybe there's something in particular that she means that we can't guess at. What it probably doesn't mean is, you know, the difference between government spending and government revenues.

People don't understand what the deficit is, and people don't care about the deficit. No politician has ever been punished for increasing the deficit, and no politician has ever been rewarded for lowering it. Directly, that is. Of course, to the extent that deficits cause economic trouble, there can be consequences for pols who help or hurt the economy. Pols also can generate positive or negative press from their actions on the federal budget, and that might matter to their electoral careers. But both of those are indirect and uncertain, and have a longer time frame than most politicians care about. For better or worse, there is very little electoral incentive to care about balancing the budget.

More on Charisma

Actually, a lot more on charisma.

Frederick Allen over at Forbes (as well as some commenters here) took issue with my claims about charisma, specifically about various presidential losers having at one time having being described as charismatic. So I figured I should do some work to back it up. I think the claim holds up, although I couldn't find enough evidence to probably convince everyone.

It's not all that easy to search for (search on "Richard Nixon charisma" and you get lots of articles about JFK, and pre-1980 stuff is harder to come by from basic public searches), but here's a sampling. Also I get the sense that Kennedy brought the word "charisma" into politics in the first place, so when Nixon was popular and telegenic (yes, he was -- Checkers was a big success) early in his career, no one would have thought to use that word about him.  I should say right away that most of the references I came across for Johnson, Nixon, and George HW Bush were about their lack of charisma, but we all know that; my claim is only that they "gained" charisma when they were winning. So here are a bunch of citations. Also, while I didn't include it below, I did find one management book that referred to "charismatic leaders like Nikolai Lenin and Lyndon Johnson." For whatever that's worth.

Richard Nixon
September 1968 Headline:

Poll Finds Nixon Tops in Charisma

Al Capp, February 1973 op-ed:

And so in Mr. Nixon we [have] the only politician forward-looking enough to recognize and understand the New Charisma.

Jules Whitcover's The Resurrection of Richard Nixon

He had more charisma than anyone ever gave him credit for.

Lyndon Johnson
From The Making of the Prime Minister. a 1965 book:

Alone among British politicians, he [a Tory politician; sorry, don't know who] has something of the Lyndon Johnson mass magic, or charisma, in the popular phrase.

A Texas constituent who dealt with Johnson in person is quoted:

He had that charisma.

Jimmy Carter
Of the four presidents I made the claim about, Carter is the easiest; there are plenty of references to him as a candidate who won on charisma, not issues. Including:

William Loeb, in a (NYT) August 1976 op-ed about why Carter and Reagan did well:

This attitude...[is] more likely to result, especially since the advent of television, from the fact that a premium is put on charisma.

After a Carter-Ford debate, a student is quoted:

I think as a leader, a country has got to have a man with a certain amount of charisma...Carter has that so much more than Ford does.

Business Week, in 1976:
The charisma that has swept Jimmy Carter to a series of primary election triumphs...

George H.W. Bush
A John Oates op-ed, November 1988

Michael Dukakis may not have the synthetic charisma of George Bush, but this election should be about character.

In 1974:

He has what political oddsmakers like to call "magnatism," that being a kind of aura about him that falls just a notch below actual "charisma."

I didn't search for anyone else, but I did come across:

John Kerry
Frank Rich says in September 2004:

The young vet's charisma so upset Richard Nixon that he schemed with Charles Colson and Bob Haldeman to counter Mr. Kerry with a pro-Vietnam attack dog:

Barry Goldwater
Tom Wicker in September 1964:

Perhaps first among his assets are the Senator's own charm and charisma...

So: basically, Carter had plenty of charisma; the other three had it for just fleeting moments when everything was going perfectly -- all three have lots and lots of references to not having charisma.

But we already know that. And there's an excellent explanation for why Carter had far more than Johnson, Nixon, and Bush, which is the thing that the three all had in common: the vice presidency. It's an office where charisma goes to die; by occupying the office, you're already a loser (and of course Johnson and Bush got there by losing nominations, as did other VP non-charismatics Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore -- although I couldn't find much on Gore pre-1992, for whatever that's worth).

Now, I don't want to say that you have to win a nomination to get charisma: John Lindsey, John Connally, Bob Kerrey, and Jesse Jackson, among others, all were said to have it, and others with similar accomplishments were said to not have it. So pre-presidential campaign, some are said to have it and some are not. But I'd bet that virtually all presidential nominees who hadn't previously served as Veep had it, at least for a few fleeting moments (and far more if they won), and even the former VPs got a bit of it when things really went their way.

So while there are other ways of getting charisma, I'll stick with my first cut: winning causes charisma, not the other way around.

My favorite quotation, by the way, is the Al Capp one about Nixon. It suggests how adaptable the concept is: if someone is winning who everyone already agreed doesn't have it, then he must have some other, superior form of it.

Sabotage

Ah, the debate about whether Republicans are deliberately trying to destroy the nation in order to win the next election, and/or whether it's okay for liberals to accuse them of the same.  It's heating up today, with an exchange between Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias, Michael Gerson, and Benen again. 

For the most part, I think Gerson's column is overblown and poorly argued, but I do think he has one thing right: conservatives are probably advocating the same policies they would advocate if a Republican was in the White House.  Well, more or less.  It certainly is true that between the beginning of the recession in late 2007 and the crisis in fall 2008, both the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress proposed little to combat it. 

Moreoever, it's good for the nation if the opposition party, well, opposes.  Perhaps the policies Barack Obama and the Democrats support are terrific; perhaps they aren't.  Either way, it's good that the other party searches for reasons why those policies stink.

I also think it's all too easy to selectively remember the most partisan stuff the other side says to build a narrative of an opposition blinded by crazed hatred of the president.  I don't know which one it was, but one of the conservative radio talk shows had a reel (for all I know they still play it) of vicious anti-Bush sentiments.  Some of them may have been out of context...I don't know -- but it's not hard at all to believe that over eight years of a presidency, it wouldn't be hard to find a few dozen extreme anti-Bush quotes, and I'm sure the same reel will be just as easy to put together about Obama.  These clips were meant to illustrate that Democrats were motivated by blind hatred of the president, but in fact they illustrate little other than that it's a very large nation, microphones are on all the time, and people don't allways express themselves very well.

So, overall, I think Democratic pols should pretty much avoid this line of argument.

Should Democrats bash Mitch McConnell for saying that his top goal is defeating the president?  Sure.  Should they take it as proof that Republicans will deliberately harm the nation in order to win in 2012?  Of course not. 

Regardless, the bottom line in politics is that questioning motives is always a bad idea.  I'd stick with agreeing with those who note that people tend to believe what it's in their interests to believe, and leave it at that. 

Now, at the same time, Democrats surely should be prepared for GOP opposition on everything.  Republicans in Congress have clearly chosen a rejectionist strategy in which they oppose (almost) everything using every tool available, rather than trying to bargain for the best deal they can get.  And (as Benen notes), there's no question at all here about a conspiracy; Republicans have been perfectly up front, if not always consistent, about advocating some policies and opposing others.  Which again means that there's no need to go questioning anyone's motives, or their ultimate goals.  Democrats should have no difficulty at all opposing GOP economic plans on their merits and on the nation's experience with them during the George W. Bush years. 

(Sabotage -- does it make you think about Bugs Bunny, or Star Trek VI?  I couldn't decide, so I figured I'd just go with the one-word header on this one.  Feel free to pronounce it the Bugs way, though).

Term Limits for Justices?

Matt Yglesias supports 'em.  I think it's an interesting idea.  Looking around, I see that there's a literature surrounding it, one that I haven't read.*  The leading proposal is for a staggered single, eighteen-year terms, meaning that there would be a new nomination every other year. 

As I've said, I tend to be very conservative about institutional design.  I'm suspicious of Seligism -- Bud Selig, the current baseball commissioner, is constantly supporting changing long-standing design because some minor flaw turned up, without stopping to consider how various portions of the design are interrelated, or that minor flaws are inevitable regardless of design.  I'm even more suspicious of those who turn frustrations with losing in a democracy into enthusiasm for changing the system.  On the other hand, I'm not against all reform.  Serious institutional breakdown, especially with a good case for inherent design flaws, should be met with reform -- the current most obvious case within American politics is California, with its impossible budget politics and destructive initiative process.  Another reason to support reform is when the underlying reality that the rules are designed for changes, so that stable rules yield an unstable political system. 

One can make a pretty good argument, I think, that lifetime appointments for Supreme Court Justices fit that last category.  As Linda Greenhouse reported back in 2007, the actual length of terms for Justices has gone up dramatically since 1970 (from an average of about 15 years before then to an average of about 26 years since).  Since life expectancy continues to grow, I expect that number to only continue to increase in the future.  And the longer each appointment lasts, the more valuable it becomes, which pushes presidents to choose younger and younger nominees (although I think we're fairly close to the lower limit on that).  Elena Kagan, should she be confirmed, may well be on the court for forty years.  At some point, I think that's a very different system than that the Constitution envisioned.

As far as the advantages and disadvantages of the present system, Yglesias identifies two problems.  The first one, which has to do with the process in which Justices are groomed and selected, doesn't really bother me much; as far as I can tell, the most recent selections under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are all highly qualified and capable, so I'm not really worried about what they had to do to get there or about those who were blocked because the system works against them.  It is true, however, that the high value of each pick creates incentives to selected a certain kind of nominee: young, ideologically reliable, and ambitious enough for the Court that he or she has known from an early age to avoid saying potentially controversial things. 

The second problem is that the system produces a lot of random results.  I do think is a serious flaw.  There's no reason that the election of Jimmy Carter (who had no Court openings) should be worth less than George H.W. Bush.  Nor is it reasonable that a president can be far more influential because his nominee lives another forty years, while that of another drops dead after a decade.  Both of these always existed, but they matter far more when average tenure doubles. 

The third problem is that it's not exactly clear why the results of elections decades ago should have so much influence in governing us today.  Justice Stevens was nominated by President Ford (and for what it's worth, that's Unelected President Ford) and confirmed by an extremely liberal Senate.  And then Americans elected Carter, and then Reagan, and then Bush, Clinton, Bush...and still, the dead hand of the 1972 presidential electorate and the 1970, 1972 and 1974 electorates and the Senators they chose controlled 1/9th of one of three coequal branches.  Abortion is important, right?  Roe vs. Wade was decided after Nixon was reelected, and after two-thirds of the Senators who confirmed Stevens were chosen.  Of course, the nature of the Constitutional system, including not only lifetime judicial appointments but also long terms for the president and Senators, imply that the Framers intended at least some of our past decisions to govern the present and the future.  But again, at some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. 

I think it's a good topic for debate...my guess would be that over time, the incentive for reform will get stronger as Justices serve for longer and longer terms.  For better or worse, however, anything the requires a Constitutional amendment, as this surely would, is always going to have rough going, and that's far more true of those things that require a Constitutional amendment and would change the balance of power between the parties (in this case, on the Court).  So while I think it's a promising idea, I think the odds of it being implemented are very low.



*Political science is funny that way.  "American Politics" is my home subfield, and "institutions" within that, institutions are generally defined as the presidency and Congress for sure, parties-as-organizations probably, and perhaps the bureaucracy.  Not, however, the courts.  That's in a "Public Law" subfield.  I try to keep up, but I follow far more of the popular discussion of courts-related stuff than I do the political science literatures.

The Obama Tax Cuts and Bargaining

I think Ezra Klein is probably correct about the policy behind the coming deal on tax cuts.  But I think he, and most everyone else, is thinking about the politics of how we got here through the wrong lens.  Oh, it's clear that Barack Obama and the Democrats are making a trade they didn't want, and in that sense are losing.  But they're winning something, too.

Actually, the best way to think of this is in the context of a post that Klein wrote (if I recall correctly) last spring, in which he noted that Republicans could have had whatever they wanted on health care in exchange for their votes.  What I think happened here is that instead of the rejectionist strategy Republicans have used on most issues, on taxes Republicans and Democrats both wanted substantive results -- and that, given the party breakdown in the Senate, made a trade-off close to inevitable.

Here's how I get to that conclusion.

First, following Matt Yglesias (here and here), it's important to remember that the context of the entire fight is that Barack Obama and the Democrats really want the middle-class portion (as they define it) of the tax cuts.  Whether that's a "sellout," as Yglesias tags it, or a sincere preference, or some combination isn't really relevant: what's relevant is that the Democrats campaigned on keeping rates the same for those below a set income level.  In other words, it's part of the Obama/Democratic agenda, the same as health care reform, banking, or environment/energy.

Now, Dave Weigel is correct that Democrats across the board did oppose tax cuts for rich people.  But the context for that was always about a positive agenda that included keeping tax rates for everyone else at or below Bush levels.  And, as far as I can see or recall, that was not a particularly controversial issue among Democrats in 2008.  It was simply part of the mainstream (liberal) agenda.

Second, following Paul Waldman and Jonathan Chait (and others), note that Republicans really do care quite a bit about upper level tax rates -- and, importantly, consider Chait's argument that Republicans are basically indifferent about tax rates for everyone else. 

If all of that is true, then it goes a long way towards explaining the tax cut outcome.  This goes back to Ezra Klein's comment about health care, in which he realized that Republicans could have had achieved practically any substantive policy concerns in exchange for a few votes.  The same was true on the other major Democratic priorities.

Understanding the tax cut debate just requires seeing that this is another of the Democrats' big agenda items -- only this time, Republicans are playing for the substance, not the issue.  And with both sides having substantive goals that they really care about, and neither having the votes to get there on their own, a deal makes lots of sense.  Indeed, seen from this perspective, the eventual deal isn't bad at all for the Democrats; they'll be getting the middle class cuts plus whatever other stimulus and safety net they can bargain for, while the GOP gets, well, the only thing they seem to care about in domestic policy.

Part of the confusion is that everyone is so used to seeing Republican rejectionism that they don't recognize accommodation (that is, willingness to make a deal that gives both sides policy gains) when they see it.  Perhaps another part of that confusion is that this may be an issue in which liberal activists really do part ways with the bulk of Democratic voters.  It's surely the case that among liberal activists, climate/energy, immigration, and several other issues are a much higher priority than the tax cut pledge.  But for many Obama voters, that's probably not true.

I'd also say that I agree with those who believe that the Democrats' spin on this issue has been far from impressive, although as usual it probably made little difference.  Still, it's made no sense at all for Barack Obama and the Democrats to publicly support anything called "the Bush tax cuts."  From the start, or even from summer 2010, it sure seems that it would have been a lot smarter to invent something called "the Obama middle class tax cuts" and supported that as an alternative to Bush tax cuts (or, even better, Bush tax increases).  Indeed, Obama could have outbid the Republicans on the "middle class" portion of the tax cuts, opposed tax cuts for the rich, and still had plenty of money left over.  Framing the whole thing along GOP lines never made any sense.  On the other hand, at the end of the day the Democrats' position was still popular, so it's not easy to see what was lost in losing the spin war.

Back to the analysis...the case rests on four assumptions: that Republicans care a lot about upper level tax rates; that Republicans are basically indifferent about tax rates for everyone else; that Democrats care quite a bit about tax rates for everyone outside of the wealthiest Americans; and that neither side has the votes to impose their preferred policy on their own.  We don't really know whether any of those assumptions is correct -- we get to hear everyone's rhetoric, but that doesn't always match with their real intent.  However, if these assumptions are correct, then the way this issue has played out makes lots of sense.

Ezra's 7 (1/7): Campaigns Don't Matter?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

1)Campaigns don't really matter. Elections are largely decided by the fundamentals of the economy. The graphs in this article would've done more to predict the 2008 election than reading Politico every day.

Reporters would be massively better off if they believed this. However, a little complexity never hurts, right?

Let's start with fundamentals. Here's what we know: it's possible to devise a formula to predict presidential general elections that contains only economic information and presidential approval and wind up with pretty accurate predictions. That puts an upper bound on how important campaigns can be -- they can't be much more important than the margin of error in those predictions. And the economy is a major factor in presidential approval.

All that said, there are a few things to be cautious about here. There's more to presidential approval than the economy (Bush's ratings were low before the recession began in December 2007, and of course they were far higher than the economy would have predicted in 2002). Some of the other things that go into presidential approval is beyond the control of the White House, but presidential actions can influence approval. That's outside of campaigns. When it comes to actual campaigns, there's a large literature on whether campaigns matter or not. I believe the prevailing conclusion is that, yes, they can matter a little. Research has found some things that can affect turnout or vote choice, and it's possible for a campaign to get a bit of an advantage by doing those things better than the opposition.

Put it together, and I think the best way to look at it is that there's no way that campaign effects are going to be responsible for any of the blowouts (1964, 1984) or even the solid victories (1980, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2008). Campaign effects may well have tilted the toss-ups (1960, 1968, 1976, 2000). But beware: reporters aren't going to help very much, even there. What usually shows up in Politico-style coverage tends to selectively call whatever the winning side is doing "good" and whatever the losing side is doing "bad." That's a media bias, not analysis.

Now, back up even further. I've been talking about presidential elections, and the general election. I think that's mostly what Ezra was talking about, too. It's worth mentioning, however, that there are lots of elections out there. House (general) elections tend to turn on district composition more than anything else, but differences between voter awareness and perception of candidates turns out to matter a lot, too. And then there are primary elections, where campaigns probably matter quite a bit.

One more thing. By "campaigns don't matter," Ezra is I think talking about the way that campaigns affect voting -- campaigns, he's saying, don't determine which candidate will win. It's worth noting, however, that campaigns have other functions. Candidates take positions on issues of public policy, and then feel constrained once in office by those positions. Of course, candidates break issue promises all the time...but overall, the positions taken during the campaign are a pretty good guide to positions they will take once in office. Had George W. Bush not needed to prove his conservative credentials in order to defeat Steve Forbes, Bush may well have not have campaigned on extreme tax cuts, and not placed such a priority on tax cuts once in office. Had Bush not run in the general election on a platform of "compassionate conservatism," he might not have wound up taken up the issue of education, and then not pushed for NCLB once in office. Another way to put this is that campaigns are about building coalitions, and choices made at that stage have consequences for politicians once they are elected.

More generally, all sorts of non-issue promises are made during campaigns, and Richard Fenno's research shows that politicians are constrained by those promises once in office.

On yet another level, campaigns are also the source of many of the people who make up a presidential administration (or a Congressional staff). Since those people can affect what elected officials actually do, campaigns matter in that way as well.

Again, this isn't meant to be critical of Ezra's list. We'd get much better reporting if journalists suddenly believed that campaigns didn't matter, instead of acting as if every tiny bit of spin and every debate line and whether the balloon fall looks nice at the conventions are the main determinants of who wins the election. Just adding a little complexity.

Pawlenty Out

And so it's the end of the line for the man they called the Minnesota Meh. No great surprise, right?

A couple of quick points:

It's wrong to say that he dropped out because of Ames. Instead, it's more the case that Ames went badly for him because everything else was going badly -- he reportedly sunk most of his available resources into the Straw Poll, but the truth is he didn't have very many resources remaining. If nevertheless it turned out that his diminished resources could buy Straw Poll success, he'd have something to sell to Republican party actors, but that didn't turn out to be the case.

This also puts Pawlenty's debate strategy the other night in a new context. It made sense as a last-ditch nomination strategy anyway, but it really made sense for someone who wanted to show that he had the fire necessary for a Vice-Presidential debate without wanting to alienate the guy who might be selecting a running mate. Was that part of a deliberate strategy? Obviously I have no idea, and it's not as if no one has ever been picked for the ticket after vicious attacks against the nominee, but I suspect that it was at least a possible factor. Not that I think he'll get that particular nod.

I was trying last night to figure out a way of talking about Pawlenty within the framework of plausible nominees that I have been using. I think what I should have said is that he was a plausible nominee who wasn't  visibly doing anything to get him closer to winning. At any rate, that's a moot point now. My old list of plausible nominees was Pawlenty, Romney, Perry, Jeb Bush, and Palin...I suppose I'd say that I wouldn't exactly change that, but I see absolutely no sign that Bush is going to get into the race, any just about no sign that Palin is doing anything that she would need to do to become the nominee. I've said from the start that my "plausible" group had well over a 90% chance of winning the nomination, and realistically we're now talking about two people. Winnowing!

Summit

Ezra Klein, young'n he, asks:

I've been racking my brain all morning, but I really can't come up with another example of a president gambling major legislation on a televised, hyped showdown with the leadership of the minority party. Congressional Democrats have been begging Obama to involve himself more directly, but this is the most aggressive presidential intervention into an ongoing legislative debate that I can remember. Can anyone think of anything even slightly comparable, or is this the opening of an entirely new playbook?

I don't think there's anything really very comparable, but I'm not sure that it's all that big a deal.  First, the comps.

Budget summits are not unusual at all.  Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton all had highly publicized budget summits with (other-party) Congressional leaders.  None of these was televised.  All were serious working meetings: they were real attempts to reach an agreement over must-pass legislation, generally with a threat of a government shutdown looming over them.  I can't think of anything that was really hyped up to the level of a "summit" over non-budget issues, but obviously it is not unusual for the White House and Congressional leadership to meet in order to hash out compromises on major and minor bills.

As far as televised sessions, the ones that I can think of are all at the beginning, not the end, of the process.  Clinton's economic summit during the transition wasn't with Congressional leaders, but Obama's health care summit early last year included both Congressional and interest group leaders.  I seem to remember that George W. Bush had a televised, or partially televised, meeting with Congressional leaders early in the process of developing education legislation.

So, this is different.

On the other hand, it's far from clear that this is anything other than a public relations gimmick.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  As near as I can tell, Obama is responding largely in a symbolic way to conventional wisdom that praises bipartisanship and hates backdoor deals.  And there may be a bit of presidential confidence (hubris?) following what everyone believes was a successful confrontation with Republican Members of the House.

But to describe it as an unusually "aggressive presidential intervention into an ongoing legislative debate" doesn't sound right to me.  Reporting had White House representatives present in Harry Reid's office as the Senate bill was being crafted from the two committee bills, and I suspect that the books written about this down the road will show that Rahm Emanuel and other White House representatives were fully involved in every step of the way -- and that the president himself was involved when needed.  Certainly, Obama's involvement in this televised "summit" is unlikely to be anywhere near as important as was Bill Clinton's personal involvement in budget negotiations in 1995-1996.

Overall, the level of White House and presidential involvement is not unusual at all.  The particular format appears to me at least to be an innovation, particularly at this stage of the process.  Seems to me that it's a creative and probably nice play, albeit one that is unlikely to be very important in the overall story of health care reform.

The Gore-ification of Paul Ryan

Regular readers know that I am not exactly a fan of Paul Ryan; I think his reputation as a bold truth-teller is undeserved. And I thought his convention speech contained one of the all-time whoppers, when he claimed that Barack Obama had spurned the advise of Simpson-Bowles, which he referred to as "they" and "them" instead of "we" and "us" -- since Ryan was not only on the commission, but was the person most responsible for it making no recommendation after all.

All that said: a WaPo article earlier this week by Jerry Markon and Felicia Sonmez is absolutely awful. It's exactly the wrong way to approach serious questions about a politician telling lies. By trivializing the issue into a series of gotchas, it is unfair to the politician because anyone who speaks in public all the time will make minor, unimportant factual errors, and unfair to the readers by failing to take the possibility that there's more here than minor gaffes seriously.

Here we go. On the trivialization front: Markon and Sonmez begin with several paragraphs describing a back and forth controversy between the campaigns about whether Ryan has been telling the truth. That's a mistake; Ryan was called out by independent fact-checkers and reporters for his convention speech, and framing the story as one of Ryan vs. the fact-checkers is a much different, and more serious, story.

Then the first specific alleged factual error that Ryan is accused of in the story doesn't show up until the 7th paragraph, and it's an entirely trivial question about where Ronald Reagan asked "are you better?" Apparently Ryan set it at Reagan's convention and not at a debate, where it belongs. Then in the 9th paragraph we get the marathon time question -- again, totally trivial. The 10th paragraph has a slightly less trivial question about whether Ryan supported stimulus funds in his district. Note that this one is more of a hypocrisy charge than one of factual error. That's typical; once the reporters choose a frame, everything suddenly is presented as evidence of it, just as an error in 2000 would have been an example of stupidity for George W. Bush but lying for Al Gore. After the (on-line) jump, we finally get to the Janesville plant from his convention speech, and told that "Democrats and independent fact-checkers have criticized" it -- rather than being told, for example, that Politfact gave that one a "false" rating. The story then gives no other examples from the convention speech, but moves back to Ryan's mistaken characterization of some bankruptcy numbers as business bankruptcies instead of combined personal and business -- again, a mistake, but not really one that's especially nefarious in my view. Ryan then gets the last word, with someone attending his rally quoted:

“Sometimes people might color their stories a little bit, but I don’t think it’s an intentional misstatement,” said Roberts, who attended Ryan’s speech Tuesday near Cleveland. “I might’ve said I made six dozen cookies when in reality, it was only five dozen.”

Well, yes, in the context of the story, that seems about right. Ryan has made a few verbal flubs, and so we should simultaneously characterize him as someone who mixes up facts all the time, but not consider it all that serious of a problem. In other words, he's exactly like the Al Gore who "invented the internet."

But in fact, Ryan was accused of -- and found guilty of -- several important attempts to mislead in his convention speech.  The Janesville plant was just one; there's also his version of the ACA Medicare cuts, and the stimulus, and of course the one that I find particularly bad, Simpson-Bowles. All of which the Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, had in his write-up of the speech. Oh, and Kessler also adds that the "didn't build it" thing that Ryan and everyone else in Tampa used was a lie, too; just because it was constantly repeated doesn't make it less of one.

Those things are the real questions about Ryan's mendacity, not forgetting where Ronald Reagan made a comment. Let's put it this way: we can debate whether Ryan is correct or the fact-checkers are right, and we can debate about exactly how important those attempts to mislead are, but they're serious business.

One more thing. Markon and Sonmez give Ryan a pass on his previous reputation, saying that "He has not been known to stretch the truth during his seven terms in Congress, according to colleagues and a review of his record Tuesday." We're given no further details about that review of his record, but budget mavens have consistently faulted Ryan for some of his characterizations of his own plans and Barack Obama's. For example, I took him to task for using the entirely false 6/10 myth about ACA. It's true that some criticisms of Ryan have been basically ideological, slamming him for being a Randian or whatever, but another strain of criticism has been that his numbers simply don't add up the way he says they do. Again, those criticisms may be wrong (hint: they aren't!), but they are very much part of the context of complaints about Ryan's convention speech.

So. What I'd say to reporters is: don't Gore-ize Paul Ryan. Don't start nitpicking every minor, trivial factual slip he makes. If it wouldn't be news if Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or Joe Biden slipped up and said it, then it's not news if Paul Ryan said it. However, do look into the accusations of serious mendacity; if you believe they have merit, then include those in the context of who Ryan is and how his campaign is going, and include them repeatedly; consider doing further reporting on it, but at the very least be aware of the kinds of things he says, and make sure he pays a price if he does it. But don't trivialize it (and I realize that the Obama campaign probably is "helping" by pointing out trivial factual errors; resist that, too).

Out of Control 2 (Frank Rich version)

I'm still trying to get my mind around Frank Rich's point yesterday. Rich dumped on Barack Obama for...well, that's where I'm a bit confused.

Rich liked Obama's speech to the Joint Session of Congress. He supposes, however, that Obama would have been equally effective "if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier." But for Rich there was considerable damage done by waiting:

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat...” [S]upport for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him.

Huh?

Obama did not, W.-like, take a six week vacation. I'm not sure how Rich missed it, but the White House, with the President of the United States front-and-center, have actively tried to shoot down the crazy.

Perhaps Rich has forgotten that Obama can't actually control what Sarah Palin says in her blog, what Rush says on the radio, or what Glenn Beck says on TV. Nor do they need invitations from him to speak up.

Or perhaps Rich believes in a showdown theory of politics. If only Obama had used just the right combination of words at the right time, the black hats would have either come to their senses and joined him or, recognizing defeat, slunk back into their caves. Hey, it worked in Mr. Smith!

Unfortunately, Mr. Smith narratives are junk, as is the showdown theory of politics. Had Obama given his health care speech back in the spring, he would have been unable to attack death panels in it...because death panels hadn't yet been created (they were created by the Sage of Wasilla in her August 7 Facebook post). Indeed, because showdown politics doesn't work, Obama's stinging rebuke of the health care fabulists didn't shut them up.

Obama isn't playing Rich's showdown politics. He's playing real-world politics, which for better or worse has actual rules -- such as the rules that the 535 Members Congress are the ones who actually pass laws. Rich is upset that Obama showed "deference" to Congress, but deference or no, there's not much any president can do to bypass Congress if that president wants something enacted into law. Presidents can apply pressure, and presidents can get involved in the negotiations. Obama is doing both. But Congress takes time to do things, especially (as in this case) when there's no emergency reason to finish quickly.

Meanwhile, Rich also seems confused about the differences between the government and CNN. He's rightly upset that, according to all available information, the Bush administration did little to combat terrorism in the summer of 2001. He's also upset that the cable news industry ignored terrorism that summer. Fair enough, on both points. But just because cable news is once again, as it always does, focusing on ephemera and distractions, does not mean that this new administration is taking the summer off, or ignoring major problems that are lurking out there. No, Obama has not demanded the "national debate" that Rich wants over Afghanistan, but neither has he prevented one (because he has no power to do so), nor is it clear that a national debate, whatever that's supposed to be, is what's needed to figure out where to go from here. Indeed, there has been plenty of debate this summer about Afghanistan (some of which, I'd bet, even showed up on cable news). More to the point, by all accounts the administration is hard at work on what appears to be a pretty tough problem. They may or may not get it right, but I think it's hard to claim that they're ignoring it.

The larger point is that governing isn't about big speeches to Congress, and so it doesn't matter very much how well Obama's timing works out for his speeches. That Obama hasn't given given high-profile speeches on financial issues (until today, at any rate) or on Afghanistan doesn't have anything at all to do with whether he's leaving those issues "to smolder," in Rich's words. To the contrary: nine months in, Barack Obama appears to be a real president, one who can work on multiple issues at a time. Even if Rich can't recognize it when he sees it.

Fall Into That False Embrace

...or, Why the Whole Close-Loop Debate Mattered. What if:

Many senior Republicans actually believe that tax cuts all pay for themselves (and that the Bush tax cuts in particular increased government revenue);

The Republican establishment actually believes that there's a huge Tea Party surge based on dislike of insiders, and that therefore candidates such as Rand Paul and Sharron Angle should be welcomed, not opposed;

The head of the GOP Senate election committee actually believes that George W. Bush is now gaining popularity.

All sorts of Republican leaders actually believe that Tea Party activists are mainly self-starting and self-sustaining former Barack Obama supporters.


The immediate electoral relevance of the big epistemic closure discussion wasn't whatever difficulties it causes for Republicans as far as developing policies for the future; it's that people in a position to make decisions may be removed from reality and make foolish mistakes as a result, costing the GOP seats in Congress.

Do we know if this is true?  Nope.  It could be that Mitch McConnell actually knows the truth about the Bush-era tax cuts, and is just spinning; it could be that national Republicans realized that Angle and Paul were disasters for them, but had various other reasons for going along (yes, they're disasters for the Republicans; even if they win, they're going to drain resources that could have been used elsewhere had mainstream conservatives been nominated and won easily).

Do I think it's true?  Granting that this is basically speculation...yup.  I think the odds are very, very, high that John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell keep Fox News on wherever they're hanging out.  They talk to people who get their news from FNC, from Rush Limbaugh, from conservative blogs.  They, their staff, and the people they talk to read the Weekly Standard; they don't read the New Yorker.  I think that both Cornyn and McConnell are practical politicians, not wild-eyed ideologues, but they're practical politicians living in a world in which people don't read the New York Times, certainly don't watch the network news, and don't seek out neutral sources of information.  It's a world in which one hears over and over again that ACORN and the New Black Panther Party are major scandals, that unemployment benefits cause unemployment, and that the Obama administration made the budget deficit explode.  The truth is, it's pretty hard if you live in that world -- or even if you just depend on those who live in it -- to keep this stuff straight. 

Bill James used to say something about how he wasn't sure that the world was just, but that one thing he did find is that the universe swiftly punishes people who believe things that are not true.  Given the way elections work, that's not always going to be the case; the chair of the NRSC can say all sorts of fool things on the Sunday shows, and it really has no practical effect.  Nominating weak candidates does, however, matter, at least in the aggregate.  Jonathan Chait is exactly right about this.  If Republicans wind up leaving three to five Senate seats, and as many or more House seats, on the table because they're nominating bad candidates who they mistakenly think are exactly what the electorate is demanding, well, that's a pretty significant effect.

Pro-Pivot

NPR has a story up today about the horrors of candidates who duck questions in debates. Apparently there's a guy who is dedicated to eradicating this scourge:

Todd Rogers, a behavioral psychologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, got interested in looking at pivots, or dodges, or whatever you want to call them, after watching the 2004 Bush/Kerry debate I quoted earlier.

To him, the dodging on both sides of that debate was enraging, and he couldn't understand why others didn't feel the same.

Well, I don't feel the same, so I'll try to explain.

Rogers and others worried about this -- and in my experience, most people are on his side, not mine -- in my view have a fundamentally wrong view of what debates are all about. It's basically a goo goo idea of debates...voters should come into the debates open-minded, the candidates should speak (rationally, honestly) about "the issues" in order to give voters a good rational basis for making vote choices based on those answers.

I think that's about 75% fantasy. Voters don't watch the general election debates with an open mind; virtually everyone who watches has already decided, or is leaning so strongly that we can probably speak of them as having decided but not realized it yet. Most undecided voters, at any rate, don't have strong views on most issues, so they're not going to choose based on carefully comparing the candidates' positions to their own, anyway. That doesn't mean that debates are worthless; I'll have a post later today  on why I think debates are valuable anyway. But the implicit model here of what debates should be is mostly based on fiction.

(What isn't fiction? I like questions about public policy rather than clown questions about campaign events or gaffes or other nonsense. Also, I'm pro-honesty, at least within reason; I don't think candidates should outright lie about things, and I favor attempts to discourage that sort of thing).

At any rate: because I don't expect debates to offer a thoughtful discussion of The Issues which will allow voters to make rational choices based on the candidates' positions, which are revealed only thanks to clever questions by moderators, I have no problems with a candidate who ducks a question he or she doesn't want to answer. For the most part, I think what's valuable about the debates has to do with the candidates talking about whatever it is they want to talk about; indeed, I think what's valuable about the campaign is having the candidates talk about what they want to talk about. Yes, I'd like to nudge them a bit towards public policy and away from, oh, whether the other candidate was really a Soviet operative (an actual debate topic in 1992), and so I'd like decent questions. But beyond that -- hey, it's a skill to answer the question you want rather than the question you're asked; it's a skill to avoid talking about what you don't want to talk about without overly insulting your audience. It's fine if politicians demonstrate that skill during the debates.

Elsewhere: Romney/Bush, First Read

At Greg's place, I wrote about Romney and Bush's similar platforms, and one difference: there's a policy gap. Bush had some, in 2000.

And at PostPartisan, I wasn't happy at all with First Read, which claimed to know what Romney and Obama were really thinking during the debate. Oy, First Read!

That's it for now; time to concentrate on the game in St. Louis for a while.

Party of Newt

Continuing readers know that I refer to Newt Gingrich as Tom Baxter, Business Visionary, after a character on News Radio who was, it turned out, a total fraud. Newt's on my mind today because of this nice post from John Sides:

You have no idea what you’re asking me to do. It takes me forty-eight hours to get the Republicans to flush the toilet.

Harry Reid, on Sept. 17, 2008, in the meeting where Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke first asked Congressional leaders for “several hundred billion dollars” to buy toxic bank assets.

From James Stewart’s fascinating account in The New Yorker.

John titles his post "Annals of Party Polarization." And fair enough, but I don't think it captures all of what's going on there. After all, Republicans weren't rebelling against Reid; they were refusing to go along with the Republican President of the United States of America, just as Newt's House Republican back-benchers did in 1990 when they opposed a budget deal reached by President George H.W. Bush. There's more to it, then, than just Republicans opposing Democrats.

These episodes, along with the 1995-1996 government shutdown, have a couple of things in common. First, they are episodes in which Newt-inspired Republicans rejected something which everyone believed to be the responsible course of action. And, second, they were total disasters for the Republican party. In all three subsequent presidential elections, the GOP got clobbered, and generally the results on the Congressional side weren't very good, either.

Since the early 1980s, Newt Gingrich and his followers have had one strategy: destroy the establishment in order that Republicans can pick up the pieces. They have consistently acted as if there's no penalty for short-term irresponsible behavior, whether it's impeaching Clinton in 1998 or running up huge deficits in Bush's first term. During eras of unified Democratic government (1993-1994, and the current Congress), that strategy might make sense, although I'm not really convinced (see note below). When the GOP does have some responsibility for governing, I think it's massively counterproductive to act irresponsibly, even if it polls well or registers nicely in focus groups.

This is not to say that Democrats always behave responsibly, but only that they don't appear, as far as I can see, to have a basic strategy that involves indifferent to the effects of their governing choices. Historians will debate whether Clinton was right to care more about deficits than traditional Democratic priorities in 1993, or whether Pelosi, Reid, and nominee Obama were right in fall 2008 to support Bush's bailout plan. My only point is that I can't think of similar actions by the Newt wing of the Republican party -- which, as of now, appears to be the overwhelmingly dominant portion of that party. Well, that's not really my point; my point is that choosing short-term populist boosts over actually governing well has worked really, really badly for the GOP, as can be seen by the long exodus of people such as Bruce Bartlett from loyalty to the party. Well, that, and all those seats in the House, the Senate, and the statehouses now held by Democrats.



Note on 1994: I thin evidence shows that the 1994 electoral debacle for the Democrats was only minimally caused by Dole's filibuster strategy, and not at all by Newt's bomb-throwing (or, for that matter, contract-writing) on the House side. Clinton's poor management of the presidency, especially in 1993 and with regard to the health care bill; the slow jobs recovery from the 1991 recession; and, more than anything, a whole bunch of context stuff about southern realignment were the real big factors in that one.