Going Nuclear Was About Republicans, Not Democrats

I'll join those who are impressed that Chris Cillizza went back to assess why he was wrong when he asserted during the summer that the Senate would never go nuclear. Acknowledging past errors is absolutely admirable.*

So I hope I'm not being too crass by saying that, alas, Cillizza still doesn't really get it right. The problem is that he sets it all up as a story about the Democrats and about Harry Reid in particular. Back in July, he argued that Senate Majority Leaders by their nature were always going to seek to preserve, not blow up, the institution; now, he thinks that the key thing he missed then were all the new Democratic Senators who never served in the minority and therefore were less committed to preserving Senate traditional protections.

I don't think he gets Reid wrong (although he might have put more weight on the side of Reid that's all about being a tough partisan fighter), and he's right that there was a clear pattern of more senior Democrats being the most reluctant to pull the trigger.

I should get to the point: what Cillizza gets wrong, both in July and now, is that the key players here weren't Reid and the Democrats; this was all about the Republicans. As I've said many times, there's always going to be a tension between what's best for Senators as individual Senators, and what's best for them as party members. The more the minority obstructs, the more that party incentive kicks in. As obstruction ratcheted up in the 1990s, 2000s, and then the Obama era, it's not clear exactly where the line is where the party incentive clearly takes over, but it's certain that "nullification" obstruction was solidly over that line.

It took a while for nullification obstruction of executive branch positions produced an ultimatum and a showdown, but that's what this summer's confrontation was about. Since Republicans backed down, Democrats didn't have to follow through. When Republicans then extended nullification obstruction to judges, Democrats predictably reacted with a new ultimatum, and had little choice but to follow through when Republicans this time did not retreat.

Indeed: what happened during the original nuclear confrontation, over appellate judges during the George W. Bush presidency, is that Democrats mostly backed down. In other words, one could argue that in that case, too, the key was the minority party -- first in ratcheting up obstruction, and then in backing down when it resulted in a nuclear threat.

Sure, the majority isn't totally passive, and isn't purely just reacting. It's certainly possible that a more senior group of Democratic Senators might have been more patient at the end. But any analysis that doesn't mainly focus on the unprecedented obstruction of the Obama era is really just missing the biggest part of the story.




*And, again very much to his credit, it's something he does all the time. I thought that I had written something about Cillizza's claim back in July and went hunting for all the things I've written about him here, and while I found a lot of pretty harsh crankiness (he seems to have been one of the first inspirations for Cranky Blogging), I also found several times he was featured in "Read Stuff" for good pieces -- and, in particular, good pieces in which he looked at criticism of things he had written and decided the critics had a point. So being open about his mistakes is nothing new for Cillizza. It's an absolutely great but fairly rare quality for any pundit or reporter, or for that matter anyone, I suppose.

Newtmania!

The Newt Gingrich presidential campaign team finally found someone to buy their spin -- Chris Cillizza wrote up the case for Newt yesterday, concluding that Newt was "underrated" as a contender and that "simply writing the former Speaker off is a major mistake."

Underrated is always an easy out, but fortunately we have two new pundit rankings this week, so we can judge exactly how Newt is rated. National Journal has him as their #7 prospect, while David S. Bernstein has him 12th, up from 19th last month. Since I'd say that NJ is closer to representing conventional wisdom than my brother is (sorry, David), I'll go with that 7th spot as where he's rated. Does Cillizza really think that he should be significantly higher than that?

On the plus side, as Cillizza says, Gingrich was big in the 1990s. Well, that's something.

On the down side...well, outside of that no one gets presidential nominations despite having achieved nothing higher than the House of Representatives, and outside of Newt's continuing lack of popularity, and that he was pretty much chased from office because he was terrible at being Speaker, and then there's the messy personal life...put that all aside, and you're left with: he was big in the 1990s. Which is, you know, a long time ago.

You know, there was a point at which it was generally considered to be a big advantage to seek the presidency while not holding office: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Walter Mondale all won nominations that way. Since then, however, there hasn't been one: Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, McCain, W., Dole, and George H.W. Bush were all in elective office when they won their nominations, as was McGovern, earlier. Moving back to pre-reform times, Richard Nixon had been out of office for eight years in 1968, which I guess is the modern record.

Looking back to ancient history...the immortal John W. Davis, he of the 103 ballot victory in 1924, had been a Member of the House from 1911-1913, but had then served as Solicitor General (1913-1918) and Ambassador to Great Britain (1918-1921). So he was a decade removed from elective office, but only a few years out of government. Fun John W. Davis fact (assuming that wikipedia is correct) I did not know: he appeared for the pro-segregation side before the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, on behalf of South Carolina. Nice legacy, Mr. Davis!

The record holder, for what it's worth, seems to be William Jennings Bryan, who had been out of office 13+ years by the time he was last nominated in 1908. Unless, of course, you count "Democratic nominee for president" as an office, in which case he still had an eight year gap from 1900 to 1908. There's also Horace Greeley, who before his 1872 nomination had been a Member of the House for a few months in 1848-1849, but his claim to the nomination wasn't really based on that service, presumably.

Newt Gingrich left office in disgrace in January, 1999. So he'd be basically challenging the all-time record, depending on how you count these things, if the Republicans nominated him for president in 2012.

Of course, none of these things make it impossible for him to win, I suppose, but underrated? No way. I'll stick to what I said before: he's Sarah Palin without enthusiastic supporters but with a marital record worse than John Edwards.

Bride of the Son of the Return of Cranky Blogging

Oh,  Chris Cillizza:

Since the 2008 election, here is just a sampling of the senators who have gone: Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Warner (R-Va.), Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), Arlen Specter (R-then-D-Pa.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and, of course Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.)

Virtually every major moment you can think of in the Senate over the past 50 years happened because of the men and women listed above. 

That's...awful, and forces me to do some cranky blogging. "50" years? That would include, say, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, bills associated with none of those worthies. Well, sure, Robert Byrd, but only in that he voted the wrong way. 50 years? Oddly enough, none of this group headed the Church Committe -- that would be Frank Church. Nor the Senate Watergate Committee, also known as the Ervin Committee. We're also missing the Big Two innovators of the 60 vote Senate -- Bob Dole, who has been gone for a long time, and Mitch McConnell, still there.

Ted Kennedy was, no doubt, one of the most important Senators of the last fifty years. Domenici, Byrd, Biden -- all had their moments. Others, including Jay Rockefeller (the hook for the article), were perfectly good legislators.

But c'mon. It's a huge changing of the guard, but this is one of the oldest, most cliched chestnuts: the "all the important Senators are leaving" piece. I remember a particularly awful one written around Nancy Kassebaum's retirement in 1996. Oh, how could the Senate survive losing folks like that? Well, it did. And it'll survive losing Kohl, Akaka, Hutchison, and, if necessary, Frank Lautenberg, too. Oh, and Ensign. Even the Benator. In fact, as I've said before, the latest group to leave was noted for either having exhausted their energy or having never had much in the first place. No, it doesn't make the Senate "a place of smaller statesmanship and decreased national sway than in years past."

Moreover, Cillizza is absolutely wrong to say that "The intractability that has dominated Senate proceedings in recent years — and led to aggressive efforts to reform filibuster rules — seems to be directly traceable to the fact that the Senate we once knew — and the men and women who populated it— are gone." The truth is that the people who instituted the 60 vote Senate were the Republican Senators of the 1990s, most of whom are in that group that is now gone. Dick Lugar? Bob Bennett? Olympia Snowe? They may have been reasonable people, but they didn't stand up and insist on voting for cloture even in cases in which they opposed the underlying bill or nomination. Indeed, one can very much make the case that they are more responsible for the dysfunctional Senate than anyone else; without them, the attempt to impose a full 60 vote Senate in 2009 would have failed.

Cillizza is apparently the only person in the world who thinks that the last 30 years were some sort of "golden age" of the Senate. Nonsense. (Hey, at least his 50 year timeline captures an era which many believe really were a golden age -- but since the mid 1970s? No way). The truth is that the Senate may to be in better shape, personnel-wise, than it has been for a while now. They still need to come up with reformed rules to make the place work, but if they can do that, I could imagine a much better era than the one just passing. And no one at all will miss Arlen Specter.

Electoral College Advantage

Have Democrats developed an electoral college advantage?

Throughout the 1980s, Republicans and some gullible reporters (and not a few easily-intimidated Democrats) assured us that there was a GOP electoral college lock on the presidency. Just look at all those states Ronald Reagan (and then George H.W. Bush) won! Even if Republicans lost some swing states, all they had to do was to win the states that they always won, and they would win the presidency.

This worked just fine...until an election came along in which the Democratic candidate received more votes than the Republican candidate, and it turned out the "lock" was meaningless.

Well, all it's taken is a grand total of one election for Chris Cillizza to roll out a reverse version of the argument. See, he says, Barack Obama is in great shape for 2012:

[A] detailed examination of the national map heading into 2012 suggests that the president still sits in a strong position for reelection - able to lose half a dozen (or more) swing states he carried in 2008 and still win the 270 electoral votes he needs for a second term. 

The problem with this kind of analysis is that it ignores the possibility that the Republican candidate might actually do better than the Democratic candidate overall. If that happened, it wouldn't just be the states that Obama won narrowly that would swing to the GOP; it could be lots of marginal states. Cillizza's "detailed examination" is meaningless; all he's telling us is that Obama won big in 2008 and could do a lot worse and still win. That's true -- but Democrats in 1968 and Republicans in 1976 could tell you that large swings from election to election are quite possible. As could George H.W. Bush.

Usually, it's safe to assume that the winner of the popular vote will win the electoral college. In very close races, such as the 2000 contest, that can obviously go wrong...but both parties are capable, over the last few decades, of winning decisively overall, and if so they'll win the electoral college, too.

The correct way to check for an electoral college advantage is to see what would happen in tie races by shifting each state equally to reflect a tie result. Up until recently, it turns out that neither party had any kind of advantage in the electoral college.

It is perhaps worth noting that while the college tilted to the Republican in the only modern election in which it actually mattered, since 2000 the college has tilted dramatically to the Democrats. In 2004, John Kerry lost the popular vote by 3% to George W. Bush, but would have won had Ohio, which Bush won by 2.5%, swung to the Democrats (and a universal swing of that size would have brought New Mexico and Iowa with Ohio, leaving Bush with a narrow popular vote lead but a 284-254 electoral college loss).

Then, in 2008, Barack Obama won the overall vote by a bit over 7 percentage points, but only a few states -- Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Indiana -- went to Obama by less than that margin; in an evenly shifted 50/50 election, John McCain would have added 72 electoral votes and lost 293-245. Even a ten point shift to McCain only adds another 20 electoral votes and leaves him a solid popular vote winner but an electoral college loser. Only after that does McCain start grabbing a large electoral college lead.

Electoral college advantages are certainly theoretically possible. A party will have an advantage if it does better in small states than large ones, all else equal; or, more likely, it will have an advantage if its votes are distributed more efficiently, with the other party wasting votes in huge landslides in large states. As I said, this doesn't seem to have been the case generally over time. For every Republican Wyoming there's a Democratic Rhode Island, and for every GOP wasted margin in Texas there's a Dem wasted margin in New York. So we'll see if 2004 and especially 2008 is a trend that sticks, giving Democrats a real advantage, but my guess is that it's just a fluke.

Translated, From the Conservative

I was thoroughly puzzled, for a while, by this Chris Cillizza analysis from earlier this week:

Republicans' decision to make the public option the focus of their efforts to defeat President Obama's health care plan may look like sound political strategy from afar but it runs the risk of distracting voters from arguments against the proposal based on more GOP-friendly issues like taxes and spending.

What puzzled me was that I've been following this thing pretty closely, and it didn't seem to me that Republicans have made the public option "the focus of their efforts" to beat health care reform. Liberals have put the public option front-and-center, yes, but Republicans? Well, they oppose it, but they also oppose Medicare "cuts," and death panels, and there's an anti-abortion strain, and they also oppose individual and employer mandates, and spending...well, if anything, Republican opposition, in my view, suffers from being not specific enough.

And then, as I was reading Steve Benen's account of John Boehner's attacks on the House bill, I understood it: Cillizza, and perhaps others, are mistaking GOP attacks on a "government takeover" with specific attacks on the public option. That's not what Boehner is saying! For conservatives, any national health care legislation would be a "government takeover." Individual mandates would be a "government takeover." So would employer mandates.

(Similarly, cap-and-trade, a climate policy embraced by Democrats in part to avoid charges of tax-and-spend that they thought would be the result of a carbon tax, has become tax-and-trade to Republicans. The best one along those lines, and I'm afraid I don't have a citation at hand, is that any new spending can be called a "tax increase," since by Republican logic any increase in spending must be paid for eventually with new taxes, even though, of course, Republicans did no such thing when they increased spending. And, of course, by that logic any tax cut is actually a (future) tax increase).

I'm absolutely certain that Boehner would still be talking about a "government takeover" even if there was no public option at all, not even Conrad co-ops, in the House bill.

Yeah, This Doesn't Work

Chris Cillizza, on why Chris Christie is a strong candidate:

As Mitt Romney, John Kerry and Al Gore can attest — and not in a good way — being, or at least seeming, like an average Joe is critically important to your chances of winning.

Except...well, you know what Romney, Kerry, and Gore have in common? They won major party nominations! And that's where things such as candidate personality are actually important. As...George H.W. Bush can attest.

Or maybe Cillizza would say that Michael Dukakis failed "average Joe" too. But then...well, Bob Dole was no average Joe, and neither was John McCain. And you know who else was no average Joe? Ronald Reagan. Maybe there's a movie star exception.

Does Barack Obama seem like an average Joe? Republicans don't think so...I don't know. But even spotting him the last three presidents, for whatever that's worth, he's still not getting there. Far more nominees fail that test than pass it, and before the Clinton/W/Obama group, I'm not sure when the previous average Joe showed up. Truman, I suppose. Surely not FDR, and he seemed to be just fine as a presidential candidate.

For that matter, thinking about FDR, or McCain, or Reagan, or perhaps Obama, reminds us that in fact "average Joe" is only one of a number of politician personalities that can work just fine. That's part of what Richard Fenno talks about in Home Style -- part of a politician's promises have to do with the type of person he or she will be, personality included, but there are a wide variety of choices. What's important isn't picking the right one; what's important is acting, after the election, how one "promised" to act.

In other words...it's just another one of those things that some political reporters and pundits are used to saying, but five seconds of thinking about it reveals that it's pretty much nonsense.

Monday Cranky Blogging 2

Chris Cillizza:

Is there anyone paying even passing attention to politics who hasn’t seen the Obama clip five times at this point — which, by the way, is less than 96 hours after he said it? Answer: no.

(via Roberts)

You know, I think it's fair to say that I pay somewhat more than passing attention to politics.

I saw the press conference live. Tweeted about the gaffe immediately, too.

I haven't seen it a single time since.

So I'm going to do a little self-Nielson to see how that could possibly happen. Apologies if it's long. Feel free to skip the next three paragraphs if you're not all that interested.

Friday night, if I recall correctly, I watched an old taped episode of "Vice" (which, by the way, I think I'm giving up on; I just don't enjoy cringe comedy), and then fortunately for me the Giants were playing the Rangers, so I had the ballgame on TV on the (sort of) local Fox sports outlet. Neither my DVR'd Vice nor the Giants made any reference to Barack Obama's gaffe.

Saturday I listened to the radio in the morning, then went to the local track for the Belmont simulcast. Made my bet, came home, flipped the TV back and forth between the Belmont coverage and the Giants/Rangers game, probably with a bit of MLB network coverage thrown in. Once again, no one played the clip, or even made any mention of it. Saturday night I mostly watched the Kings/Devils game on NBC, once again flipping over to MLB network during the breaks; I understand there was also a fight, and an important NBA game, which I'm sure a lot of folks watched. After the game, if I recall correctly, I watched a taped episode of "Girls." Yet again, no clips of Obama or Romney at all. I suspect that one or more NY pols were at the Belmont, perhaps even the Big Dog, but if they were on it was while I was watching Vogelsong's gem.

Sunday? I'm sure the clip was on at least some of the Sunday shows, but like normal Americans I don't watch the Sunday shows. Instead, as usual I followed the much more sensible path of listening to one of two Sunday Beatles shows I always listen to while reading the newspaper (which, granted, did mention the Obama gaffe, although my old-fashioned print newspaper had no video clips enclosed). Then errands, pickup basketball, and home to more Giants/Rangers. After dinner and some reading, we watched a Buffy episode (season six; we've been watching with our eldest, who is a big fan, but it's taking us forever to get through season six for what I should think are obvious reasons), and then we watched the big Mad Men season finale. At some point in there, also watched about ten minutes of the Tonys. Now, I know that not all that many people actually watch Mad Men, but we did tape that show with Starbuck which I believe does get good ratings. Perhaps it'll turn out, whenever I get around to watching it, that it's just chock full of clips of the Obama gaffe. I sort of don't think so.

For what it's worth, I don't recall watching any clips of anything on the computer or any other devices this weekend, and obviously that's not all that normal. I did, I believe, receive copies of several clips over email, but I rarely watch them, and certainly didn't over the weekend.

Hey, I don't pretend that my political TV watching habits are normal -- after all, hardly anyone uses C-SPAN as a go-to destination during ads. But I'm actually very confident that most normal people not only have not seen the clip of Barack Obama's press conference, but haven't heard word one about it.

And those who do know about it? They're the real attentive citizens, but we also know that the more people pay attention to politics, the more they're likely to be strong partisans.

Of course, if Team Romney winds up using the clip in ads for months, yes, everyone will see it. Will it change minds? Fairly unlikely. The whole campaign, everything from who the candidates are to the debates to the ads to GOTV to platforms, only moves the final results a few percentage points at best; it seems highly, highly, unlikely that one particular sound bit could do very much at all.

Cillizza compares "doing fine" to gaffes by John Kerry and John McCain, but both of those candidates probably did a bit better than the fundamentals might have predicted; there's no way to know, but it seems highly unlikely to me that the specific quotes made any difference at all -- and quite plausible, actually, that the Big Themes that the quotes were used to illustrated didn't actually make any difference, either. It's more likely that people who would have voted against Kerry or McCain anyway found the themes that that the other candidate was attacking on to be useful explanations for a decision already made.

But that last bit, about the ultimate importance of gaffes, is at least a fairly complicated question that's difficult to nail down empirically. The question of what regular people watched this weekend? That's easy -- and the answer is surely not the Obama gaffe clip.

A Much Better Defense of "Dumb" Poll Questions

The last Washington Post/ABC poll asked a couple questions that have been ridiculed (well, at least on twitter) all week. For example, “On a ship in a storm, who would you rather have as the captain?” WaPo's Chris Cillizza today attempted a defense of these questions, and only made things worse.

We’ve long maintained that the vote for president, more so than any other vote, is a feel vote.  That is, the up-for-grabs voters don’t simply go to the websites of the two candidates, make a check next to every issue they agree with Obama or Romney on and then add up the columns — voting for whichever of the two men had more checks to his  name.  If they did, George Bush wouldn’t likely have beaten either Al Gore or John Kerry.

The problem is that they can maintain that all that they like, but there's just no evidence that this sort of thing is real. Or, more to the point, the odds are very good that the relationship runs the other way: first voters figure out who they will vote for, and then they go back and make up justifications for it, later mistaking those explanations with the real reasons. Those justifications might be issues-based, or they might be classic retrospective ones (such as the "better off" question), or they might be these personal attribute questions. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve everything if we directly ask people why they decided. For better or worse, we're just not very good at all at understanding the reasons for our candidate preferences.

So of course voters don't vote based on a careful comparison of issue positions, but these kinds of questions don't get at how they do vote -- by party, by group, and yes, by retrospective evaluation.

But that doesn't make "dumb" questions a bad idea! If properly devised (and that's tricky to be sure), they may be able to get at the stories we tell ourselves about why we're supporting one candidate or another. That has to be done carefully, I think; it would be easy to imagine questions which essentially invent those stories, rather than reflect pre-existing ones. But in principle, it should be possible, and while that might not tell us why a candidate was winning, it might tell us something about what was in voters' minds, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Somewhat less seriously, such questions can be fun, and there's nothing at all wrong with having some fun with electoral politics. Just because we might realize that "who would you rather have a beer with?" might not be a question that really illuminates why swing voters went a particular way doesn't mean that it isn't any fun to think about.

In general, I'd say that too much political coverage is based on the idea that it's news if it predicts who will win or if it explains why a candidate is winning. Nothing at all wrong with coverage of how it's happening, even if it doesn't answer that "why?" question. And I'm really not convinced that this is viewer or reader driven; I think it's just a norm that doesn't make sense.

So, pollsters: go ahead and ask "dumb" questions; reporters, have fun talking about them. Just don't think they're explaining stuff that they can't explain, and you'll be fine.

(UPDATED Note: I didn't save the links, but Brendan Nyhan on twitter has been really good about silly polling questions. Also, John Sides had a really good post about knowing our reasons for political choices, but I couldn't find it. [Link added above, but it was a Lee Sigelman post, not John] My apologies for the laziness. I have no idea how either of them would feel about my defense of these questions, however).

Cranky Monday Blogging 2

Item:

Chris Cillizza has a long post about Barack Obama's re-election chances and the electoral map.

I know I've made this point several times, but...Just stop it!

States are not units which move independently of each other. They just aren't. Instead, when Obama is more or less popular, or generically whenever one party becomes more popular, it produces more-or-less equal shifts across all states. If Obama wins by five points nationally, he's going to win Pennsylvania and Michigan and Iowa and Wisconsin and, basically, the Al Gore states from 2000 plus a few others, and he'll win easily. If he loses by five points nationally, he's going to win what John Kerry won in 2004 minus a few states, and he'll lose easily. He's not going to run the same in most states but surge or drop dramatically in a handful of battleground states. It doesn't work like that.

It is possible that the shape of the electoral college could give one party a relatively small advantage in very close races, but (1) that doesn't appear to be true, and (2) the way to show that is to demonstrate that one party has more "wasted" votes (such as the huge Democratic majorities in New York or the huge Republican majorities in Utah). If you're not doing that, don't talk about the states this far out. And even if you are doing that, don't talk about the states this far out. It's possible we'll have a very close election and quirks in the electoral college and distribution of votes by state will matter, but it's far more likely that it will be just like most elections, with a clear national win one way or the other that is reflected and, for that matter, magnified by the electoral college.

WaPo Reporters Try to Put Political Science Bloggers Out of Business

Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza look over to today's recall elections in Wisconsin and...utterly fail to hype it beyond reason. C'mon, reporters! If you always were this reasonable, there would be nothing for me and the rest of us political scientists to blog about. Our bread and butter is this kind of stuff -- reporters or pundits look at today's news and extrapolate it wildly without any basis for doing so, we explain why such-and-so even is probably not nearly as big a deal as all that. But if reporters are going to cut in on our racket...well, it's got me worried, I'll tell you that.

I should add a bit of discussion of the actual substance here, I suppose. Just because nothing that happens in Wisconsin today will overturn everything doesn't mean it isn't both interesting and, in at least a limited way, important. To begin with, it's a great political story: Republicans roll in after an election, choose to implement highly divisive policies that they basically didn't even campaign on, and meet all sorts of resistance despite having the votes to do what they want. There's all kinds of stuff here...about the way that particular rules (quorum rules in legislatures, the existence and type of recall) interact with preferences; about the relationship between elections and policy; about political mobilization; about unions and their opponents. And something like this can be important even if it's not about to spark a national movement or change the 2012 presidential election. After all, it's certainly important within Wisconsin, and it's not a stretch to assume that GOP politicians and union activists in other states are all paying close attention to today's results -- and that their future actions may be affected by those results and how they are interpreted.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Summer Glau, 31. OK, I'll try to get off Whedon tomorrow. Depending on who shows up.

The good stuff:


1. Mona Yacoubian on Syria. Not cheerful, at all.

2. See also C.J. Chivers on the military situation there. Via Drezner.

3. I'm really impressed with Chris Cillizza. He had a column all about how the local economies in swing states would affect the election yesterday morning. Later, he became aware of the political science findings that in fact impressions of the national economy, rather than what's happening close to home, is what makes the difference...and he not only ran an item about it over at The Fix, but he reprinted an entire John Sides post. Really: I can't blame anyone for getting it wrong sometimes, but the difference between the good ones and the bad ones is whether they're open to admitting mistakes, or at least presenting evidence to the contrary. I don't know anything about how this all came about, but there are a lot of reporters who wouldn't even come close to doing that. (And of course, kudos too to John for writing about all this so well).

4. And Matt Yglesias takes on Michael Jordan and taxation. As usual, I claim no knowledge of the NBA. The obvious point to make is that (1) it's absolutely true that Jordan's success made lots of money for people in and around the Bulls, but (2) all of that probably is exactly the same if Jordan was taxed quite a bit more than he actually was, which was also higher than what he'd be paying now. I was not, however, aware that Wilt Chaimberlain is an example in a classic argument against progressive taxation.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to David Boreanaz, 44. Totally impossible for me to get my mind around the idea that there are people who think of him as the guy from Bones; he still has a few more episodes as Angel, but not very many. Angel is my least favorite of the Whedon TV shows, but I am happy to see that Gunn is going to be on the Avengers show. Excellent.


Oh, I shouldn't forget the good stuff:

1. I only have a very plain blog, full of what are apparently technically called text-heavy pieces of content. Nevertheless, I agree with Chris Cillizza.

2. Sarah Kliff on the Senate actually confirming someone to head the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services.

3. Framing. No, not the public opinion kind; the baseball kind. Catchers, that is. Ben Lindbergh explains what a big deal it appears to be.

4. And Matt Yglesias on Star Trek -- including his best-of rankings. Only one quibble, really: I still think the torture episode of Next Generation is pretty awful. He underrates the Kirk series, but I'll give him that on changing tastes and standards over time. He nailed the movies, though. Maybe I'd put First Contact a bit higher, but no real complain there. I do think, on his main essay, that the quote that best captures the Star Trek idea is the cultural imperialism speech that Quark makes at one point about root beer and the Federation.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to James Marsters, 50. By the way, he was the best thing about Caprica. Although granted that's not saying all that much.

And some good stuff:


1. Yes, funny is hard, but Alex Pareene is exactly right about this one.

2. Meghan Kiesel tries to track down the George Romney and McDonald's story. 

3. Sylvia Friedel talks political ads with GOP consultant Fred Davis.

4. Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama.

5. And good for Chris Cillizza for drawing even a little attention to state legislatures and their elections.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Bernie Williams, 65. Yes, 65; no, not that Bernie Williams. This one was an OFer for the Phoenix Giants when I used to go see them all the time.

Plenty of good stuff:

1. Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy take a closer look at some of the shutdown polling.

2. Matt Yglesias is right about Medicare Part D and ACA.

3. I largely agree with Chris Cillizza's myths about the House GOP. I suspect he's right that the dozen or 20 or 30 or 60 or 80 radicals who have put us where we are are a lot less coordinated than one might think from some of the coverage. Good point.

4. Molly Ball reminds us that a substantial chunk of Republicans really don't approve of compromise.

5. C-SPAN ratings? Huh. I guess it's true that some people will watch anything. Brian Stelter reports. (And you all know my view: Brian Lamb is a true Hero of the Republic).

6. Seth Masket on parties and the shutdown.

7. And Ed Kilgore pushes back some against my TAP column. I should be clear about what I think. I absolutely believe that the press should cover the substance of political battles, whether they are legislative or electoral. As a matter of fact, I also absolutely believe that the press should cover the ephemera. What I don't think the press should do -- or that pundits should do -- is make claims that can't be sustained. The press shouldn't tell us that something will affect elections when it won't. They shouldn't tell us that something will affect pubic opinion when it won't. Or public policy, when it won't. That may sound terribly obvious, but in fact those principles are violated all the time.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mark Margolis, 74.

A little good stuff:

1. Sometimes, PolitiFact does a good job. 

2. I'm really not a big fan of the DW-Nominate assessment of presidents, but kudos anyway to Chris Cillizza for taking the best evidence around, whatever its limitations.

3. Seth Masket on House/Senate. As I said yesterday: guilty, but with an explanation.

4. Sarah Kliff reviews the ACA points you might need for Thanksgiving arguments.

5. Speaking of stuff I don't really agree with...I need to link to this one, from Alan Jacobs and Scott Matthews, although it would tend to undercut the arguments I've been making about the long-term public opinion effect of ACA success or failure. I'm not convinced, but if you're interested in the discussion, be sure to read what they have.

6. And Julia Ioffe explains what happened to Heritage.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to the great Barry Lamar Bonds, 49. Probably still would be a league-average hitter, if they hadn't blackballed him. Certainly as great a player as any of us has seen. And was just good at so many things on the field, beyond his too-good-for-the-game hitting during the late career surge.

Some good stuff:

1. Huh. Chris Cillizza is now willing to write that House Republicans are primarily responsible for the lack of compromise in Congress. Interesting (via...sorry, someone caught this and put it on twitter, but I didn't save it).

2. A new paper by Anthony Johnstone on campaign finance disclosure, with the abstract at Election Law Blog.

3. Another abstract: Melissa Miller and Jeffrey Peak on gender and press coverage of Sarah Palin's VP campaign.

4. Of course I agree with Matt Yglesias about revolving doors and corruption. Except I mostly don't worry about it at all, not just in the circumstance he discusses. Excellent post.

5. And I have mentioned that I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best blogger out there, haven't I? Yet another good one.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jacob Cruz, 40. Continued playing, and usually hitting, in the minors up through 2010, including stops in Korea and Mexico. Would he have made it if he was handled differently? Probably not, but we'll never know. I always liked him.

Some good stuff:

1. Jennifer Victor pivots off the schmoozing discussion to talk about social networks and why they matter.

2. Andrew Rudalevige on the recess appointments decision.


3. Patty Murray as Senate Budget Chair; Matt Yglesias is right about this.


4. Dan Larison listened to Bobby Jindal. He was not impressed.

5. Andrew Sprung on Obama and moving public opinion (and me).

6. And Chris Cillizza's great ode to "Saxby." Key catch: yup, it's Lamar!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Charles Martin Smith, 60. The Toad. Also directed "Welcome to the Hellmouth," for which, as long-time readers might remember, he earned an appearance in my epic Reagan thing (which I do try to link back to every once in a while. I like it).

Well, whether you're in the mood for Reagan or not, surely you want some good stuff:

1. The Wall Street Journal really, really, really, shouldn't run op-eds by "expert" Suzanne Somers. Alex Seitz-Wald explains.

2. I think Andrew Sullivan basically gets it right on surveillance, including Obama's role to date -- although my view would be that all of it exploding on him this year suggests that he should have been more aggressive on it early, despite the likely short-term political fallout. In other words, while I have a fair amount of sympathy for a president who ducks an issue for (electoral) political reasons, I think the answer here is that the best political play was to find a way to take it on.

3. Marc Ambinder is also very good on intelligence, although I'm not really buying his Bill Clinton hook -- the rest of the column though is excellent.

4. The latest 2014 forecast from Alan Abramowitz.

5. An explainer about insurance cancellations, from Sarah Kliff.

6. And Chris Cillizza backs off his earlier comments about redistricting when presented with evidence. Excellent!

No, Really, Don't Think About the Electoral College Yet

...because if you do, you might wind up with what Chris Cillizza wrote over the weekend, in which he concludes that Mitt Romney's ceiling is basically what George W. Bush got in 2004 -- that he "he has a ceiling of somewhere right around 290 electoral votes."

That's just plain wrong. It's an illusion -- it looks like that now, because Barack Obama is up a bit in the national polls, and because no Republican has done better than Bush '04 for quite some time. But as Harry Enten tweeted, if that was the case Bill Clinton couldn't have won a large electoral college victory in 1992. Indeed, the late 1980s was full of talk about a Republican "electoral lock," which magically went away as soon as a Democrat led in the national polls by a few points.

Real simple: the parties are roughly even nationally, all things equal. All things are generally not equal, which means that in any particular presidential election it's possible to see fairly large swings, in both directions. If the swing produces more than about a three point win, the system will produce an electoral college landslide, just as it did for Barack Obama in 2008.

Seriously. Look, the campaigns have to pay at least some attention to the electoral college, because they need to target their resources. But if you're trying to figure out who is going to win the election, or the margin of victory, you're just going to be a whole lot better off if you pretend the electoral college doesn't exist until at least after the conventions.