Those Radical Democrats

Proof today that people just don't understand the basic Keynesian ideas about deficits. At Roll Call, Nathan Gonzales claims that Obama-era Democrats are "rallying against two of the highest profile accomplishments" of Bill Clinton's presidency. Timothy Carney:

How extreme have Dems become? GOP adopts 1990s Dem policies, Dems blast them for it

Well, not really.

On one of the two issues Gonzales raises -- DOMA -- is certainly a large flip for most Democrats. I wouldn't call it a Clinton "high profile accomplishment," but no question about it: calling the Democrats "extreme" on LGBT issues in 2013 compared with where they were in the 1990s is a fair call. Of course, that also would require calling over half the nation "extreme," but it's a big change, no question.

But the other one? No way. Gonzales raps Democrats for celebrating a balanced budget in the 1990s while running deficits in the current decade. He's sort of dimly aware of a justification:

Of course, Democrats will point to a difference in the state of the economy from the mid-1990s to today, but that doesn’t completely explain the marked change in philosophy when it comes to a balanced budget.

That's totally wrong; there's no "philosophy" change here at all! Basic Keynesianism says: run deficits during hard times, and then balance the budget (or run surpluses) during good times. Okay, it's a bit more complicated; given the very particular circumstances of 1993-1994, Team Clinton was convinced that medium-term deficit reduction was good for short-term growth (although they also pushed a stimulus package in 1993 that was killed by filibuster). At any rate, while they certainly did and do brag about the Clinton balanced budgets, there was never a "philosophy" of balanced budgets. 

The actual principle? It's even simpler than "deficits during recession, balance during booms." It's: deficits are a tool of economic policy. That's all. There's no inherent correct level for budget deficits, and there's nothing particularly good or bad, in the abstract, about deficits; it's all about how fiscal policy affects the larger economy.

And Democratic have pretty much stuck with that from the 1930s, certainly from the 1940s, to now. They've made mistakes, certainly, along the way, and every once in a while they'll give in to the rhetoric of deficits fetishists, but there's zero change of philosophy that I can see.

I'm Here I'm Not

Hey, it's MMM -- Marjorie Margolies, one term Clinton-era Member of the House (and now Clinton extended family member) is reported to be running for her old House seat in Pennsylvania. I have no idea whether she'll return to Congress; she'll apparently have to survive what could be a tough primary for an open Democratic seat.

Margolies (at the time Margolies-Mezvinsky, thus MMM) is famous for supplying the winning vote for the Democratic budget in 1993 and then, as Republicans predicted, losing her seat in the GOP landslide of 1994. At the time, her district was hotly contested, and so it's no surprise that she failed to hold it; 1992 was a good year for Democrats, and 1994 a bad one, however she had chosen to vote on that bill. She had won very narrowly in 1992, by less than a single percentage point, and then lost by four points in 1994 -- a far smaller swing than her party suffered nationally. One has to be careful about these things...the national swing was probably driven mostly by enormous shifts in Southern districts, so it would be useful to match up comparable districts to see what happened. Still, it's hard to say from those numbers that her loss had much to do with her, or her vote. It's more of a myth than fact.

At the same time -- it's hard to argue that Democrats in 1994 would have been worse off if their economic plan had been defeated in the House (if there really was no other available vote). Republicans could still have run against it -- and against Democratic chaos, as well. Of course, they had plenty of that, with Clinton's failed stimulus and failed heath care plan. That is, failed in Congress.

The other point about Margolies, which I talked about last time she was in the news, is that her vote is often discussed in terms of voting her convictions against her district, but that's not how she describes it; in an op-ed during the Obama-era health care debate, she defended her vote in terms of how it (in her view) was good for her district, not in terms of putting some other priority ahead of representation. That doesn't necessarily mean she was a good representative -- that's a much more complicated question. But it does seem that she was attempting to do what she thought was good for the district.

I'm sure nothing anyone says at this point can change what everyone "knows" about her brief tenure in the House. It's worth noting, however, that much of what everyone "knows" appears not to be actually true.

Oy, Fournier

Ron Fournier:

A president is in trouble when he’s forced to defend his relevancy, as Bill Clinton did 18 years ago, or to quote Mark Twain, as Barack Obama did today. “Rumors of my demise,” he said at a news conference, “may be a little exaggerated at this point.”

Not wrong – just “exaggerated.” Not forever – just “at this point.”

Parsing aside, Obama channeled Clinton’s April 18, 1995 news conference by projecting a sense of helplessness – or even haplessness – against forces seemingly out of a president’s control...

“So my question to you,” ABC reporter Jonathan Karl asked Obama, “is do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through Congress?”

Ouch. “Well, if you put it that way, Jonathan,” Obama quipped, “maybe I should just pack up and go home. Golly.” Then he quoted the humorist Twain, who once denied his death....
[T]he president risks losing the public’s faith when he waves the white flag too often, especially on problems that can be fixed. Blaming the GOP and larger structural problems don’t help the country, much less his legacy.

Interesting theory! If only we could find a way to test it.

Oh, wait -- I know.  We can look it up and see what happened.

When Clinton was supposedly projecting helplessness, Gallup was in the middle of a poll, and he scored a fairly weak 46% approval rating. Did his widely-reported press conference destroy him? Was it a disaster for him to "wave the white flag too often" leading to his "losing the public's faith"? Uh, no. Actually, his approval was already up from the winter lows, and spiked up more after the Oklahoma City bombing, although that was short-lived. So it basically stayed in that same range through the summer, and then gradually started improving that fall, and didn't stop improving until he became a very popular second-term president.

Oh, and along the way he was emerged victorious in a months-long budget battle with a Republican Congress.

What Fournier may be remembering is that a lot of reporters jumped on Clinton's press conference remarks to write his obituary. What he's not remembering is that those reporters were dead wrong. It turned out that Clinton was in fact relevant; it turned out that reporters who were pressing him were the ones who misunderstood the situation.

(Bonus feature: Fournier refers to John Boehner as "far less charismatic" than Newt Gingrich. I don't really know what charismatic means, but whatever the case is with Boehner, Newt Gingrich is unusually good at making himself very unpopular with most voters. Although there are will always be some reporters who buy his snake oil).

There's sort of a confusion of terms here, anyway. It does matter, per Neustadt (and I think he's right), what Members of Congress and other "Washingtonians" think about the president's negotiating abilities. It doesn't matter, however, what the public at large think, since they're not the ones negotiating with him. It might matter how popular he is with the public at large, but that's likely based more on results (whether correctly attributed to the president or not) than with the inside baseball of Hill negotiations.

At any rate..."relevant" wasn't a disaster for Bill Clinton, and doesn't even make a good symbol for his low point, which was several months earlier. What "relevant" really symbolizes is the ability of the press corps to misunderstand what's going on -- they didn't see, for a long time, that Newt Gingrich was a toxic disaster for Republicans and that Clinton, after two mostly awful and disappointing years, had improved his performance considerably and was also in good shape for becoming popular as well.

Which doesn't mean that "demise" will turn out to be...well, the point is that it doesn't have any deep meaning at all. No matter how much some reporters want these things to work that way.

Catch of the Day

(Updated)

The Catch goes to Ed Kilgore, who notes the similarities between this year's and last year's Republican obsessions. The key point, however, generalizes beyond that:

When a significant group of politicians decide to make some event or issue the center of media attention, they can often do so to a considerable extent whether it makes sense or not. When an entire political party becomes committed to an event or issue as of transcendent importance, it instantly becomes so regardless of the merits of the case.

That's right; we tend to assume that heavy news coverage is the result of the choices of editors and producers, but it's just as common for news coverage to be driven by whatever politicians believe, or pretend to believe, is important.

Plus it's a good excuse to tell my favorite GOP-scandal-obsession story, which I've told here before, but unless my search skills are awful it appears I haven't told it for some time now. This was about the Clinton-era White House travel office story...I tried to explain the scandal last time, so you can click over if you want a bit of context, but you don't need it (although if you do click through, you'll get the Frank Grimes theory of anti-Clintonism). The basic idea was that it was a major fizzle of a scandal, but that didn't prevent it from looming large for at least some Republicans trapped in the mid-1990s early and primitive version of the conservative information feedback loop.

Anyway, the story (which may be apocryphal, but is too good to drop; if anyone actually has a source for this, I'd appreciate it  see update below)) is that during the 1996 debates the Dole campaign arranged for the guy who had been fired from the travel office to sit in the front row. The theory, you see, was that Clinton would panic when he saw the victim of his supposed corruption -- I guess it's sort of on the analogy of Hamlet's "catch the conscience of the king" plan, except even less clever. Because, well, first of all, Bill Clinton was highly unlikely to be thrown off his game -- uh, had they ever actually watched Clinton in action? And second of all, because, as the story goes, Clinton wouldn't recognize the guy; he had never met him, and as president had less fictional things to pay attention to.

I'm sorry for repeating myself, but it really is my favorite Clinton story. The thing is that the important context for Clinton-era scandals is that Fox News didn't exist, and the blogs didn't exist, and still they managed to obsess about this stuff. And not just on the fringes, as was the case with some of the more bizarre left-based obsessions during the George W. Bush years; the Clinton "scandals" were very much mainstream within the GOP. So much so that (okay, if the story is really true, but I do believe it is) a presidential campaign fooled itself into believing that it was actual news, not puffed up silliness. Which, of course, hasn't changed a bit.

Oh, also: nice catch!


(Update: Dave Hopkins passes along an AP story confirming most of the story: that Dole's campaign did put him in the front row, and did it to "rattle" Clinton. Not confirmed by that story, but probably correct, is that Clinton didn't recognize him; at any rate, Clinton wasn't rattled. Thanks, Dave!).

Catch of the Day

The Catch goes to Steve Kornacki, who points out that Newt Gingrich and Republicans in general have never owned up to being dead wrong about the Clinton tax increases:

The refusal of Gingrich and most other Republicans to grapple with what actually happened in the 1990s is a major reason the GOP has maintained its absolutist anti-tax posture for the past two decades. They’ve alternately credited the 1994 elections, the ’97 capital gains tax cut, and the dot-com bubble with the surpluses of the late ‘90s – anything, it seems, to avoid acknowledging the reality that taxes went up on the rich in 1993, and nothing bad happened.

Which is true.

Except it does depend on how one looks at it.

If you're Newt Gingrich, then the main reality is that taxes went up on the rich in 1993, and it immediately produced disaster...for Speaker Foley and the Democrats. Indeed: from Gingrich's point of view, the Bush tax increases before that produced Bush's defeat in 1992.

Now, in reality, it's far from clear that either of these electoral outcomes were caused by higher taxes (as I read the evidence, the 1992 election outcome was not at all affected by higher taxes; the case for 1994 is a lot more murky). But the "learning" that's so important in politics doesn't depend on or use careful causal analysis. More often than not, everything associated with winning campaigns or electoral cycles gets credit, and anything associated with losing campaigns or electoral cycles gets blame. Especially anything which was those participating in the events believed at the time was a big deal, or have other incentive to believe in.

So, yeah, on substance it's of course absolutely true that Republican claims -- specific, testable claims -- about the effect of the 1993 budget package were completely and totally wrong. But it's very understandable that Republicans learned the opposite lesson from it, because politically it was extremely easy for them to believe that raising taxes was a total disaster for Bill Clinton and Congressional Democrats.

The really scary part? If Republicans were able to conclude that about the 1993 tax increases, in which their policy predictions were clearly way off, just how much more are they likely to believe that the Affordable Care Act was a policy disaster, given that the political (apparent) effects were similar but the policy predictions and effects will presumably be a lot more ambiguous.

At any rate: nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Garry Shandling, 63.

Meanwhile, some good stuff:

1. Dan Larison on Ronald Reagan and "winning" the Cold War. Yup. Reagan deserves the same credit that everyone from Ike through Carter deserve -- for keeping to the basic policy Truman established. Not that they all did it well, whether the blots were major or minor, but they all wound up sticking with a winning framework. I do think Reagan deserves credit for accepting victory when it came, and George H.W. Bush deserves quite a bit of credit for that and for managing victory well. Beyond that, however, what Larison says.

2. John Norris is very good on what hurt the early Clinton administration -- but it wasn't just in foreign policy (and see also Larison).

3. And as much as I like Alyssa Rosenberg, and I think this is a terrific post...I think she gets David Lynch horribly wrong.

Reagan's Second Term and the Bizarre Reputation of Tax Reform

Politico today has a pretty weak item about second terms and what Barack Obama should do to secure a good one. I'm no expert on Teddy Roosevelt, so I'll pass on that part of it (and remind myself that I should really learn more about that era; suggested reading?), but calling Ronald Reagan's second term a success is, well, odd.

In particular, calling Reagan's second term a success compared to Bill Clinton's is odd. Politico's Edward-Isaac Dovere acknowledges the Iran-Contra scandal, but seems to vastly underappreciate it. In several ways. First, it was pretty obviously a bigger deal in policy terms than the Lewinsky scandal. Second, the effect on personnel was large, beginning with a White House Chief of Staff and a National Security Advisor. And, third, the effect on presidential popularity was entirely different. The Lewinsky scandal coincided with a Clinton surge in popularity, with Clinton consistently over 60% approval throughout 1998. Reagan, however, was hit hard by Iran-Contra; he fell about 15 points right away, and stayed at his new level of just around or below 50% throughout 1987 and into the summer of 1988 before finally recovering.

(As Brendan Nyhan notes, the article generally buys into myths about Reagan's popularity and his communications skills).

Anyway, what redeems Reagan's second term for Dovere is...tax reform. Well, some foreign policy triumphs too, but I'd put those aside, given that it was about 90% Gorbachev, and Reagan's main accomplishment was not messing it up (and he almost did, in Iceland).

But: tax reform? Really? I've been seeing a lot of this lately, and I don't get it, really. Oh, I'd say it was an accomplishment; as policy, it was probably just fine, and it didn't unravel all the way, even now. But it was only somewhat Reagan's, as opposed to Congress's, achievement. It had nothing at all to do with Reagan's real goals. And...it just wasn't all that big an accomplishment, was it? It certainly didn't seem so at the time, and I don't see how subsequent events have proven it to be.

I guess my general feeling about tax reform is that it's a mixed bag. First of all, I'm with those who don't understand why reducing the number of tax brackets is even remotely a good thing (or a significant bad thing; it's just sort of change-for-change-sake). So that leaves the benefits of reducing special tax treatments and lowering rates. I'll trust the economists who say that the benefits of that are real, if not especially large. But I'll also note that the inevitable next step is that the various favorable treatments creep right back in after reform.

Now, perhaps the benefits of cleaning the whole thing out once a generation or so are still worth it (even given that there are presumably costs of change, too). Maybe not. But it's just hard for me to take the 1986 tax reform as any sort of big deal.

Is it good advise for Barack Obama to point to Reagan's tax reform "achievement"? I'm not really convinced. Consider one of Bill Clinton's second term achievements: children's health care (S-CHIP, 1997). Isn't that something far better for Obama to emulate? Not in health care, of course, but the analogous issue area for Obama -- one where his legislative initiated failed during his first two years -- is climate. The idea would be for Obama to find some relatively small, but still meaningful, climate program, and find some way to get it through a divided Congress (for Clinton is was a thoroughly Republican Congress, so Obama may have a slightly easier task).

I do think that revenue-neutral tax reform is probably something that Obama could get done over the next four years, and if House Republicans want it I don't really see why he should oppose it. I just don't see why Obama should consider that an important goal.

And, really, I don't see why any president should seek to emulate Reagan's second term. His first term? Yes, Reagan does have solid lessons for any president, conservative or liberal. But his second term? It's full of examples to avoid, not ideas to use.

Oy, Bai

I know, I know, it's fish in a barrel, but still:

It’s pretty amazing that Hillary and Bill Clinton continue to occupy such a central role in foreign policy and in the presidential campaign, respectively, a full 20 years after they first emerged as national figures. To put this kind of staying power in perspective, can anyone imagine the Obamas upstaging the Democratic nominee in 2028? Or Mitt and Ann Romney mulling another national run in 2036? Not likely. Though you can kind of see Bristol Palin showing up for the 500th episode of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Why, yes I can imagine Barack Obama giving a convention speech in 2028 that upstage the nominee.

Look, I know this is just a throwaway paragraph from Matt Bai, but it's just so, I don't know, typical of his historical myopia. Why are Bill and Hillary still a big deal 20 years later? Because they were young then, and because Bill Clinton survived eight years in the White House with his party still liking him.

I mean, it's not as if examples are hard to find, anyway...Richard Nixon first "emerged" in 1952, and was pretty important at the GOP convention in 1972. Bob Dole, 1976, and then 1996; for whatever it's worth, his wife ran for president in 2000. FDR emerged in 1920 and was sort of a big deal in 1940; his wife wasn't secretary of state, but she was UN Ambassador 30 years after he was first on a ticket. Even Ronald Reagan: first a candidate in 1968, still a pretty big deal in 1988.

Of course, if Ronald Reagan were alive and in good enough shape to give convention speeches, we would be treated every four years to silly speculation about how the GOP was hurt because he was upstaging the nominee. We practically are now, anyway.

Oh, and if children count (he mentions Bristol Palin), then, yeah, I think I could imagine George H.W. Bush's son having something to do with a convention a couple of decades after his father first became a national figure. I mean, if we count Bush as a national figure from when he was RNC Chair, and anticipate Jeb's next campaign...oh, and that doesn't even count Prescott Bush. Or the next generation.

No, neither Mitt nor Ann Romney is going to be running in 2036...because they'll be in their 90s by then, and  because Ann isn't a politician. But if Barack Obama wins in November and avoids any disasters in his second term, he's going to be an incredibly beloved figure in the Democratic Party for a long time, and if his health holds up and he wants to he'll surely be speaking at the 2028 convention and far beyond that.

Q Day 3: Clinton/Tsongas?

I'm not sure why, but Ron E. asks:

What do you think would have been the election results in 1992 if, say, Paul Tsongas had won the Democratic nomination? You can choose whether you think Ross Perot would still have run under that scenario or not.

OK, I do like this question.

To begin with, you can never get into a politician's head, but generally I'd say that as far as I know Perot was motivated by his ego and his hatred of George H.W. Bush, so nothing there. On the other hand, as Steve Kornacki would note Perot didn't really affect the outcome.

As far as Tsongas...I've probably mentioned this before, but I consider him one of the most dishonest candidates ever. That's not really relevant, but I always like to repeat it (I don't know that he knew for a fact that he was dying, but I don't think he was honest about the situation).

I don't know...I tend to believe that out-party candidates make little difference. I'd definitely say that Bob Kerrey would have probably done just as well as Bill Clinton did. Tsongas? I don't know; it's so unlikely that it's hard to imagine what a nomination-winning Tsongas would have looked like. I guess what I'd say is that I'm open to the idea that just from candidate campaigning quality I'm open to the idea that Clinton could have done a couple of points better than Tsongas. They would presumably have been about the same in terms of perception of their ideology -- which does matter, and could have made Tom Harkin a couple of points worse -- but for the rest of it you have to figure that they're about as big a spread as you could get on electioneering skill, no? So call that a couple of percentage points in November, but then remember that a Tsongas who could actually be nominated would be better at that stuff than real Tsongas was, and so never mind.

(Okay, Tsongas had ideological/issue reasons for not getting the Democratic nomination, too. It's a good reminder that the last loser standing isn't always the one who came second-closest to winning the nomination -- Tsongas and Jerry Brown in 1992, probably McCain in 2000, Santorum this year).

Are the 1980s and 1990s Really That Long Ago?

President Clinton, President Reagan. And if you look at them, you can criticize them for lots of things. They by and large worked their will. On this, President Obama did not.

That's Bob Woodward talking to Diane Sawyer about his new book on Obama and the debt limit showdown.

Both Kevin Drum and Ed Kilgore react by arguing that Things Are Different Today -- it's not right to compare Obama to previous presidents who served during periods in which polarization was less all-encompassing. While there's obviously something to that, my impression is to just say:

Hogwash.

Reagan worked his will? For a year, maybe eighteen months, in which he had a Republican Senate and a conservative majority in the House -- yes, mostly, and impressively. After that? Hardly at all. Are there any significant Reagan initiatives pushed through Congress from mid-1982 on? Not that I can think of. Certainly aren't any federal agencies shut down. Instead of tax cuts, there are a series of tax increases, beginning when Republican Senators worked with Democrats in the House to convince Reagan to accept tax hikes in 1982. After that, his Congressional situation deteriorates -- liberals retake the House in the 1982 elections, and Democrats recapture the Senate in 1986. For the last six or seven years, Reagan is playing defense, and frequently losing (remember, just as one example: Iran/Contra only happens because Congress actually shuts down a proxy war the White House wanted). If Reagan worked his will from 1983 on, his will was very different than what we've been led to believe.

Clinton worked his will? During the two years of unified Democratic government, Clinton did manage to pass a budget plan, but he was famously defeated on a stimulus bill and even more famously clobbered on health care reform. Later, his famous "victory" over Newt Gingrich in the 1995-1996 budget showdown was certainly a political win and was a lot better for Clinton than many of his supporters feared he would settle for, but it's laughable to call the final deal a case of "worked his will." Clinton did get some things from Republican Congresses; they compromised more or less on welfare reform, and he got S-CHIP, and some other stuff...but no one who was paying attention then, or in the 1980s, would think that the White House was overall achieving what the president thought he was elected to do.

The truth is that other than a few very brief periods (FDR in the first couple years, LBJ for eighteen months or so) the president has never "worked his will." It's a ridiculous standard to hold Barack Obama to -- presidents aren't supposed to work their will within the US Madisonian system, and they don't. There's nothing new about that, and you don't need a Tea Party crazies explanation to know that Obama wasn't going to get all he wanted out of Congress. Oh, they certainly made it worse, and may have made the situation somewhat more dangerous (although comparing it to the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Woodward does....er, I already used hogwash, laughable, and ridiculous, so I'm afraid I'm running out). The idea of a president not getting his way, however? That's just normal politics.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to the Big Unit, Randy Johnson, 49. Soon to be yet another Giants HOFer.

Getting to the good stuff:

1. David S. Bernstein on the apparent incompetence of Team Romney.

2. A nice Jonathan Chait post about the Clinton years that I overlooked when he wrote it last week. It's really true: Republican anti-Obama stuff may be slightly different in flavor, but it isn't any different in intensity or substance than the anti-Clinton stuff was. Chait is right: non of the major players have any interest in remembering that fact, but it's a fact nonetheless.

3. Amy Fried on why Obama is doing well in Ohio.

4. And Nate Cohn is bullish on Obama's chances based on the early post-convention polling. I remain in the wait-and-see camp, although it's certainly hard to argue that Romney had a good two weeks.

More on No GOP Bill Clinton

I argued last night that there's no Republican Bill Clinton because "Republican gatekeepers and, probably, Republican audiences don't want that kind of thing."

Andrew Sullivan makes a good point:

Also: their most recent former president was the worst in modern history. And both Bushes had a hard time arguing their way out of a paper bag. 

Here's one place where presidents really do matter, both in their actions and in the examples they set. But it's not the Bushes that we need to look to. It's that other guy, the one that Republicans worship. Parties emulate their successful presidents, and for Republicans Ronald Reagan is their successful president.

It's hard, for those who remember George W. Bush but not Reagan, to explain the earlier Republican president. See, people called Bush stupid, but I'm convinced that isn't true (I've said this before, but I'll repeat it: I've heard him talk baseball, and he sounded quite intelligent). The thing about George W. Bush is that, in my view, he had little if any interest in government and public affairs, or in politics other than as a competition for office, and given that there were also few incentives within his party for him to sound as if he knew what he was talking about, he didn't bother.

Ronald Reagan, though...All the evidence on Reagan indicates that he certainly was highly interested in and very much cared about government and public affairs. He didn't, contrary to what some thought, just want to play the role of president; he really did want to be president, and he really believed in and cared about policy and ideological outcomes.

But Reagan's relationship with the truth was pretty complicated, and he would regularly say things that were just not true. I mean, regularly: after every press conference someone would have to clean it up (back then they cared about such things). William Safire attributes "misspoke himself" to Ron Ziegler talking for Nixon, but I think (although I could be wrong) it was really popularized for ordinary things with Reagan's presidency. The thing is that Reagan's genius was for believing what he wanted to believe, and once he was set on something it was nearly impossible to break him from it.

At any rate: during the Bush years there was a fair amount of pushback by Reagan supporters, but at the time one of the lessons that Republicans learned from Reagan was that facts just get in the way; what you want are politicians with strong beliefs, not a complex grasp of details. After all, Jimmy Carter was well-known as a micromanager; under Reagan, however, someone from his administration once said, everyone in the White House went to work knowing exactly what the long-term goals of the presidency were. There was some truth in that, and indeed the positive side of it really was a significant strength of Reagan as president. It's just that there was no truth at all in the flip side that facts just get in the way. It definitely caught on, however, and next thing you know perfectly sensible Republican governors are agreeing to give George W. Bush a presidency he was ill-equipped to handle.

If we think about what could change the current GOP antipathy to policy, facts, and the rest of it, the most likely answer would be that they could have a successful president who sets a different example. In part, that would take staring down Rush Limbaugh and the rest of his crowd -- something that neither Bush had any interest in. But in part, it would just be by example. Bill Clinton taught lots of young Democrats that his way of doing politics was the right way to do it. A successful Republican president could teach a generation of Republicans that lesson.

However, it doesn't seem possible to get to be a successful Republican president in the first place by acting like that. So, Catch-22. Especially since, in my view, the kinds of things that make it difficult for Republicans to speak sensibly about policy make it equally difficult for Republicans to develop and implement good public policy. Which means that even a stealth policy wonk Republican who managed to win the nomination and get elected would have some difficulty becoming a successful enough president to be the one who sets the better example. Granted, it doesn't have to be as bad as George W. Bush. But it really is quite the problem for them.

The other way out of it would be a revolt by the party as a whole against the Becks and the Limbaughs and the rest. That's possible; it's just not something that happens very often.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Idris Elba, 40. Hoping to get to Luther sometime in the next few months.

I'd get to it quicker if there wasn't so much good stuff:

1. Ezra Klein on Bill Clinton: The "Wonk-in-Chief." I have to say: a fair amount of Clinton's speech sounded as if he's been reading the liberal policy bloggers -- Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Harold Pollack, Paul Krugman, Stan Collender, Kevin Drum, etc. etc. etc. -- and jotting down all their best arguments (while polishing them into something that really works in a speech) and saving them up for a good chance to use them. See also Dan Larison.

2. All of them. Sarah Kliff: "Bill Clinton's prepared remarks: 3,136 words. Bill Clinton's remarks as delivered: 5,895 words (counting audience cheers)." At one point, he started listing the popular programs that Romney/Ryan would have to cut to keep their deficit promises, and for a second I thought he'd go through every single one of them. Including where the field offices are that would close in the battleground electoral college states. And the names of the caseworkers who would be laid off when that happened. And their children. Including names, grades, and teacher's names.

Granted -- Bob Dole, for one, knew that stuff as well as Clinton did, and perhaps better, and certainly didn't need the prepared text. But Dole couldn't set it to music like that.

3. Digby: "You don't have to talk to people as if they're children with no capacity to understand complicated issues. They yearn for it." What I'd add is that they may yearn for it even if they don't understand the complicated issues; they appreciate a demonstration that the people who they elect to office do understand this stuff.

4. Moving on...what you want to know about whether negative ads work.

5. And more on that knife fight between all the presidents which I think I've linked to before (if not, here it is, via John Sides, who notes that the comments are worth it).

Democrats Day 2

I already did one item about Bill Clinton's speech over at PP, but I probably have more to say about it. Beyond that: I missed a couple of hours there, but from my twitter feed, it doesn't seem that I missed much; I got back a little before the broadcast hour, and mostly discovered that the Democrats don't have enough CEOs to select based on speaking ability, and that Elizabeth Warren isn't much of a convention speaker.

Anyway, Bill Clinton. Yeah, he'll do.

I'm not neutral on this one. Regular readers know that I like politicians as a group. And, well, he's just so much a politician. As much as I tell people that you can't really get inside their heads, it's about as certain as anything can be that he just loves it. Just loves it. Not just, as I've seen some say, loving that the crowd loves him -- he sure seems to love every aspect of it. Particularly, policy: learning the most wonkish of details, but then transforming them into something that...well, I can't really judge if average voters can understand it, but what he's brilliant at doing is transforming it into something that can impress average voters by sounding like it's extremely substantive while at the same time impressing policy folks by actually being extremely substantive, and (usually, and as far as I could hear tonight) factually honest.

Look, here's the thing. GOPer Steve Schmidt said tonight (and I'm sure plenty of others did too) that "“I wish to God as a Republican we had someone on our side who had the ability to do that.” But you know what? It's not just luck that Democrats have a Bill Clinton and Republicans don't. Granted, political talent could show up for either party. But a Republican these days couldn't do what Clinton did tonight, because Republican gatekeepers and, probably, Republican audiences don't want that kind of thing.

It's not that there are no solid, factual, arguments for the policies Republicans prefer. There certainly are! But a politician who tried to stick to those would be competing with the Glenn Becks of the party, and the Rush Limbaughs, and the Newt Gingriches, and the "facts" that those party leaders constantly trot out. Democrats, to be sure, have to compete with some fringe voices who have a dubious grasp of facts and policy, but for whatever reason those voices are kept on the fringe. That's just not the case for Republicans.

It's not always been that way. But that's how it is now.

And so Paul Ryan gets a reputation as a substantive Republican...while repeating the most nutty myths about budgets and health care reform (yes, a David Obey would or a Henry Waxman will give a very partisan interpretation of contested facts; how often do they just make stuff up?). And so Republicans celebrate the policy ignorance of a Herman Cain or a Sarah Palin. And so Republicans don't even bother forcing George W. Bush to show he knows anything about policy or government before they nominate him; to the contrary, they argue that he's a better president because he's not bogged down by all of that stuff and can better govern from his instincts.

You're not going to get a Bill Clinton if your party gives no incentives at all for a smart youngster to try to become that sort of politician. Truth is, a Republican who really knew policy well enough to make the arguments Clinton made tonight would have to hide it.

Monday Movie Post

There are essentially two things good about Political Animals, the recent six-episode miniseries on USA. Make that three things: six-episode length is excellent (I just finished State of Play, also. Six episodes is excellent).

The other two things? Well, we get to watch Sigourney Weaver, which is always a great thing. I've actually missed a lot of highlights of Weaver's career, and this reminds me that I really should seek out more of her stuff. Fans of Washington movies will know that she was wonderful in "Dave," but she's even better in this.

And the last worthwhile thing about it, as Alyssa Rosenberg pointed out, is that it's a rare entertainment about powerful, smart, capable, political women. It has a bit of an aspect of a feminist fantasy to it...at each turn, the women wind up triumphing, always (as Rosenberg noted) with the perfect zinger, the perfect line. Since we have so few of these, it's refreshing and very welcome.

(Warning: the rest of this contains spoilers, so if you care...)

That extends all the way to the end, at least in some ways. The reporter who is the second lead character after Weaver misbehaves in various ways, including sleeping with people she shouldn't sleep with -- except in this version, she comes out of it pretty much just fine, while her boss loses his job. This, shall we say, does not happen often on TV. So all of this is good: the women are allowed to be strong but also to fail at some things, and without falling back on men saving them or having them inordinately punished.

And yet...well, several things.

First: as a show, it's a mess. I guess I should back up a bit...I haven't mentioned the main conceit, which is that Weaver is playing (a version of) Hillary Clinton -- former first lady, lost a tough nomination fight, is now Secretary of State. Anyway, instead of one daughter, Hillary and Bill have a soap opera family of two sons who  would fit right in with the Tates and the Campbells, except that those characters were better developed and more interesting. Six episodes is not enough time for, say, the gay suicidal drug-addict son to be anything more than awful. So as a show, you have to really want your feminist political power fantasy (and really enjoy Weaver) to make the rest tolerable.

The second thing is that the Hillary wish fulfillment (she's going to challenge the president who beat her for re-nomination) makes the feminist wish-fulfillment pretty awkward, or at least so it seemed to me. Yes, it's cute to see this version of Hillary dump her Bill, although as the show goes on you wonder what the point is, since they're basically back together. Beyond that, however, what struck me is that we sort of have to buy into that Bill is his worst image, and of course Hillary should have been president instead of Obama. Not to mention that some people might not actually like Hillary because they're, well, Republicans; the only Republican we get to know is not exactly impressive. If it was a bit less about Bill and Hillary in all but name then I don't think it would be a problem, but I think it is, here. So: when in a late episode she basically shames the not-Obama president into being a good president after all, and teaches him how to do it, I just couldn't get past how condescending it was to real-Obama, even though the show's character shares neither ethnicity nor any other obvious traits with the real thing.

And then...well, the thing sort of collapses on itself eventually. The big plot conflict for Weaver's Elaine Barrish is that she wants to run for president again even though it will probably destroy both of her (adult) sons. Wait, what? What's that doing in here? Do we really need to have an exaggerated career/mother conflict? And the resolution in the final episode is just awful: as both of her sons' lives collapse, she decides to bow out after all...although only to run for vice president, which apparently wouldn't be hard on her family at all...except that then the president up and dies and leaves the villainous VP in change, and now she's just got to run after all. Which I think, although I couldn't quite tell, was supposed to be okay because now she's going to do it because the country needed her and not because it turns out she was just being ambitious with her earlier decision to run. If that's what we're supposed to believe, it's awful: the whole point of the piece is presumably that her ambition is a good thing. Anyway, it would have worked fine if the sons had less desperate problems, but as it is we're ping-ponged rapidly from being told that it's okay for her to sacrifice her ambition for her family to being told that she needs to do it anyway.

Perhaps I'm asking too much of a show on USA. To their credit, I thought the political (unlike the personal) twists and turns were at least plausibly okay. I just wish that more of it had been watchable, and that the ending wasn't as messed up as it was.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Kristin Hersh, 46. I'm not sure there's an album from the 00s that I liked better than 50 Foot Wave's Golden Ocean, and generally she's one of the people I listen to the most these days.

The good stuff:

1. Ed Kilgore on the myth of the Clintonite revolt.

2. Medicaid and doctors: Sarah Kliff reports on a new study and its implications for ACA implementation.

3. And have you been following Alyssa Rosenberg's return to The Wire? She's started the second season now. Worth it.

Sunday Question for Liberals

And here's one that I have asked before, but it's been long enough that I'm interested again: After almost four years of Barack Obama...have you changed at all what you think of Bill Clinton's presidency? If so, how?

Elsewhere: Sex Scandals and Representation

Just one item today: over at Post Partisan, I have a post on Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and representation; in particular, about the nature of "promises." I'm arguing that the reason (former) supporters are so bitter about Edwards but not about Clinton is because the Edwards family was really central to his 2008 campaign, and so lying about the nature of the family meant breaking a promise that was central to his relationship with his supporters.

I think it's a good piece. As longtime readers know, representation is one of my big interests, but I haven't written about it for awhile. The way this one happened is that Ryan Lizza tweeted a comment about the different reactions to their seemingly similar transgressions, and I answered "Representation. Edwards broke an implicit promise to supporters; Clinton was semi-honest from the beginning", and he said "???." At which point I realized that I really needed to explain it, and it was going to take a lot more than 140 characters. So there you are.

Catch of the Day

Excellent reporting from Aaron Blake, who notices that all seven of the candidates that Bill Clinton has endorsed in Democratic primaries this year supported Hillary Clinton in 2008, while in six cases their opponents endorsed Barack Obama.

Blake ends the piece by framing it around the question of how important Clinton's endorsement might be, but what I find far more interesting is whether we're seeing the beginnings of a more enduring factional split or not. I've done some research (with Casey Dominguez) that sort of touches on questions of factions within the Democratic Party, using data from way back in 2000...we were interested then, among other things, whether DLC involvement was relevant to the Gore/Bradley choice. The whole question of party faction, however, is still a fairly obscure one as far as I know, especially in the US context (explicit, well-organized factions have been important in some other democracies, but they don't really happen here). So the question I'd have is: could something that begins essentially as a personal faction in presidential politics wind up getting institutionalized and spread to state and local politics? If so, would it eventually develop policy components -- even though the original split didn't really have any?

My guess is that the answers to these questions is that on a theoretical level, this could happen. But in the present Democratic Party, it's very unlikely. Both of those, however, are just guesses...anyway, if you want to know what I find really interesting, it's this sort of thing. I'll almost certainly be looking out for it when the 2016 invisible primary gets underway (which, of course, isn't all that long from now).

Oh, and: great catch!

Titles

Did you see that the airport in Little Rock is being named after Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Putting aside the obvious jokes (which I made on twitter yesterday, but it fell flat, which is why I feel compelled to mention it again here) about why Arkansas is naming something after a New York politician -- perhaps this is a good excuse to push an idea that American politicians should, as Emily Yoffe argued in a terrific post earlier this week, act like Americans and stop using their titles after they leave office. See Paul Waldman's follow-up, too. Hey, even Walt Disney knew this one: the theater on Main Street shows "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln," after all. In a democracy, Mr. or Ms. is a good enough title for anyone.

Back in the 1990s, I used to think that Bill Clinton was the right guy to start the trend. If he insisted on being Mr. Clinton now, I think there's a good chance it would catch on. But he didn't. Perhaps impeachment made him a bit more title-insecure than he would have been otherwise; perhaps it just never occurred to him.

Why Clinton? Well, it would presumably take a populist president to think of doing it...I wouldn't expect Ronald Reagan, for example, to have considered it. Nor would I expect it of anyone whose legitimacy as president was under fire: so not Nixon, or Ford, or Carter, or George W. Bush (and here's one case where it surely matters that Obama is the first black president; it would be entirely inappropriate to ask him to give up the title in the future while the other members of the ex-presidents club are using it).

Well, I hope he reads Slate (or the Prospect...well, I hope he reads Plain Blog, too, for that matter) and starts thinking about it. Surely by now impeachment is long past and his reputation as a legitimate president is safe and secure. After all, he's got an airport named after him! Maybe he could even get his buddy George H.W. Bush, surely secure in his reputation and with his own airport in Houston, to go along with it.

Yoffe is right: it's downright unAmerican to give people titles once they're done with their jobs. But she and I and you believing that isn't going to do any good. You know what we need? A Cincinnatus-of-the-titles, to take the lead and return to being a nice, citizenly Mr.

What about it, Mr. Preside...er, Mr. Clinton?