Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Penny Johnson, 52. I really should think about going back someday and watching "24" -- I've watched maybe five minutes of one episode, and never had the sense I would enjoy it at all. It sure did have a lot of actors I like, though, although (and don't tell me) I have the sense that most of them were killed off pretty quickly. She was very solid on Larry Sanders, and even better on DS9. Okay, it helped that "Kasidy Yates" is one of my favorite names. And I enjoyed seeing her show up on Castle, too. Hmmm...hey, I'm pretty sure I watched at least some of the Paper Chase TV show when it was on, and turns out she was in that, too. I wonder how many other actors there are who I've watched as regulars, or at least significant occasional characters, on four different shows?

Oh well, better get to the good stuff:

1. Scott Lemiuex on drones.

2. Kevin Drum on judicial nominations.

3. And the 80th anniversary of the first Fireside Chat was this week; Carah Ong discusses. I don't really know how important that speech was, but if there was ever a moment when confidence in the president mattered, that was it: at issue was whether citizens would trust that re-opening banks were safe. If they did not, the result could have been further runs on banks, and the continued collapse of the banking system...and then, who knows? People didn't know, in March 1933, that capitalism and democracy were the wave of the future.

Monday Movie Post

Ready? I am -- I'm going to try to revive this feature, only slightly because the great Seth Masket has been putting me to shame lately with a few great posts.

So: while Seth is up to date and all with a post on a movie currently in theaters, what I watched for this...well, it's not recent. It's Louisiana Purchase, a Bob Hope movie from 1941 (from Paramount).

Okay, here goes. First the movie...I don't know. I really don't get Bob Hope -- that is, what all the fuss was about. I sort of get him as an Oscar host, or something like that, but as a major movie star? So this is a silly little comedy/romance/musical with really very little going for it, as a movie. At least unless you love Bob Hope, I guess. Well, there are Irving Berlin songs, but to tell the truth they didn't do much for me. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

As far as the politics...it's about a crooked scam that Hope is the inadvertent front man for, and the US Senator who comes to New Orleans to expose it. As regular readers know, I love stuff about corruption, but I'm not really seeing much of interest here. I suppose the obvious hook, however, is that it ends with a Jimmy Stewart type filibuster, by Hope (who is in the Louisiana legislature)...no, I have no idea whether LA had filibusters then or now, but if you want a (slightly) comic take on the classic Jimmy Stewart filibuster, here's your movie. Again, it's a 1941 movie, just two years after Mr. Smith.

What I actually found interesting were two jokes. I have no idea how to properly interpret them, but (and again, 1941) I thought they were worth the trip. My transcription, if I get any of it wrong:

Marina von Minden (a refugee from Vienna):
  I have my first citizen papers already.
  In a few years, I get my second papers.
  And then I go on...relief.
  Heil Roosevelt!

Republican US Senator Oliver Loganberrry:  
  ...ah, Coolidge and Hoover.
  Well, in those days it was still legal for a Republican to be President.
Yvonne Bordelaise:
  Why, isn't it legal anymore?
Loganberry:
  It hasn't come up recently.
  But if it ever does, I don't think the new Supreme Court would declare it Constitutional.

So: I can't really recommend this one, but as I said I'm just not a huge Bob Hope fan, so perhaps others would like it more than I did. It's fine, but just not something that I'd go out of my way for at all. As for the politics...mostly if you're really interested in popular representations of filibusters. But still, I thought the FDR jokes were interesting, so that made it worth it for me.

I have a few things stacked up to watch, so perhaps I'll get back to making this feature more regular for a while, at least during the off-season.

Westen Again

I'm real tempted to just write: Drew Westen is wrong about everything, and Jonathan Chait is right about everything, or at least everything Westen-related.

But since that would be a little lazy, let me just address one thing that Chait skipped and then make one important point. Oh -- I should back up a bit...Westen published an awful piece in the NYT a few Sundays ago, and then some people (including Chait, and me) fired back, and now he's responding to a few of them, especially Chait.

So, Westen:

I was actually not a stranger to the workings of the Senate, having been asked by the Senate leadership to serve as a strategist to help pass Wall Street reform, which they did in record time after the disastrous 15-month health care debate.

"Record time"??? Putting aside that I suspect liberals were on balance happier with the final ACA compared to their initial hopes than they were with Dodd-Frank compared with their initial hopes...record time?

We'll start with ACA, which passed in March 2010. That's 14 months after Obama was sworn in, so it's certainly not any more than that. I'm not sure how to date the beginning of the "debate," but let's say it was after the stimulus bill passed. That makes it 13 months, not 15. Close enough? Oh well.

What about Dodd-Frank? That legislation was kicked off in June 2009, about 4 months after health care got going. I'm not sure what "record time" means, but it didn't pass in June 2009. Or July 2009. It didn't even pass the Senate at all in 2009, although it did pass the House in December. No, it didn't pass the Senate until May 2010.  The rest, though, was relatively fast; it only took two months to go through conference and then both Houses of Congress, passing in mid-July, 2010. Let's see, that would be...13 months. Or, just about exactly as long as it took to pass health care reform. Record time? I have no idea what Westen is taking about, but perhaps you can see why my initial temptation was to just say he was always wrong.

Yeah, it's maybe a little petty, but Westen himself uses that paragraph to credential himself against charges that he doesn't understand constraints on the presidency. So the idea that he horribly mangles the facts does suggest that said charges should not be dismissed out of hand.

Ah, well. I'll move on to a more serious discussion. The important point I mentioned above is about Ronald Reagan and FDR and the supposed powers of presidential rhetoric. Westen says:

The argument that great oratorical powers have little or no impact on the course of events would have come as a surprise to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who both changed American politics for decades with their capacity to reassure the American people and to offer a new vision of government -- in one case of an active government that could make people's lives better and in the other of a bloated government that was picking their pockets.

I have no idea what Reagan thought about the influence of "great oratorical powers" on the "course of events," but as far as I'm concerned there is virtually no evidence that he did any such thing. Of course, his actions while in office affected the course of events, and I'm open to the possibility that some of his presidential rhetoric affected future generations of Republicans...but where, exactly, is the evidence that Reagan's rhetoric had any effect at all? After all, if Reagan really made Americans reject "bloated government," wouldn't they have resisted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which passed and was instantly accepted soon after Reagan left office? As for FDR, think about what it took to get the US into the war. Hint: it wasn't his great oratorical powers. I don't want to say that the president's oratorical powers are entirely and completely useless, but it's just very, very easy to overstate the importance of that stuff.

Compared, by the way, with events and actions. You know why people accepted "an active government that could make people's lives better"? Because FDR put together things that actually did make people's lives better. Not, in most cases, because of the way he talked about it. That's why the ADA is useful to think about. It's actually a pretty big deal; young'ns might not realize this, but thirty years ago a huge number of small things that make people's lives easier (curb cuts, ramps, rails) just weren't there.

If you want to change the way Americans think about government, what you want to do is implement programs that work really well. If rhetoric helps around the margins to achieve that, especially by helping get you and like-minded people elected, fine. But it just isn't going to do much more than that.

The Westen Piece

Everyone is talking about Drew Westen's mega-article in the New York Times yesterday, which takes Barack Obama to task for not being a good storyteller. As I'm sure regular readers will expect, I think it's bunk. I didn't want to deal with it over the weekend, however, and so others beat me to the main points, and made them better than I would. #1. Westen misunderstands the presidency, and even misunderstands the power of rhetoric within the presidency; John Sides explains. #2. Westen isn't even right about the basic facts; Andrew Sprung, who follows Obama's rhetoric more carefully than anyone else I know of, has no difficulty finding several examples of Obama saying exactly what Westen wants Obama to say. And a long time ago, Brendan Nyhan was excellent on Westen in general.

But if that's not enough, I'll add a bit. What Sprung doesn't really knock down is Westen's claim that Obama, unlike FDR, failed to find a villain in his rhetoric. Westen:

Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

This is a much-beloved quotation for those who place a lot of stock in the idea that presidents must identify villains, but it's a cheat. I suspect that Obama will let loose plenty of partisan zingers during the campaign next year (indeed, he did as much during the midterm campaign last year). However, Westen's point is about 1933, not 1936. Is it true that FDR's inaugural was about "who had caused it"? Not really, I'd say. The famous line is, to be sure, about a villain, but it's not bankers or Repbulicans -- it's of course about "fear itself." Now, it's absolutely true that FDR did spend three paragraphs of his inaugural on what the what happened and who did it questions, and he refers to "the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods" and the "money changers" (twice) during those passages, but it's "fear itself" that has the starring role. By the way, is Obama all that far of when he talks about the "consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."? Not to mention calling (unspecified, to be sure) others "childish"?

Anyway, I'm really talking about FDR, here. So: the first Fireside Chat is about reopening the banks. It's wonderful; I like it very much. But it does virtually nothing of what Westen wants. There's almost nothing about blame. Way down at the bottom, there's a little bit about some bankers having been "incompetent or dishonest," but it's hardly the thrust of the piece; instead, it's all about how good and safe and normal banks are going to be now. I'm not going to go through all the Chats, but I did read through the second one and: no villains at all.

So, to sum up: presidential rhetoric matters far, far less than Westen wants us to believe, but at any rate Obama did say the things that Westen says Obama didn't say, but FDR did not say the things that Westen believes FDR said.

A couple more things, perhaps a bit more political sciency. One is that (and I hope John Sides will correct me if I'm wrong) we know virtually nothing about any long-term effects of presidential rhetoric. We know quite a bit about short-term effects, and we know they're mostly very limited. Long term, though, is a bit harder to tell. My political instinct says it doesn't make much difference...but I really don't know that to be true.

The second thing is that I think comparing anything about Obama to FDR, especially in comparing 2009 to 1933, is just a mistake. Richard Neustadt defined the Truman and Ike years as "midcentury," saying that they featured "emergencies in policy with politics as usual." It contrasted with FDR's time, when politics as usual was suspended -- at least for the first couple of years, and then again for a while after Pearl Harbor. In my view, by that definition, we're still in midcentury, and have been except for a very short time immediately after the September 11 attacks. January 2009 was midcentury by this definition, and there's simply nothing that Barack Obama could have done about it. But March 1933 was not, and it gave FDR plenty of room to maneuver that Obama (and all of the president in between) just didn't have. That, and not Obama's rhetoric, is the key thing that separates them.

Anyway...this now concludes my obligation to say something about the Westen article.

UPDATE: See also what the always-excellent Eric Schickler has to say about FDR.

Presidents Act on Party Priorities

(See Update below)

Via a nice tweet from Brendan Nyhan, I see that Jay Cost is continuing to try to link the Democrats' problems (which are, of course, very real) to their decision to act on health care reform:

Rather than focus on doing what the voters elected them to do, they instead focused on a longstanding ideological goal of the party elite. On the other hand, if  [...] Obama had focused on restoring the economy - just as Franklin Roosevelt did in the historic 73rd Congress of 1933-34 - they might still be set for losses, but I think they would have been greatly mitigated, as at least they could claim they did everything that could be done to restore the economy to health.  Similarly, if FDR had decided to pursue the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Social Security Act rather than stabilizing the economy during the First New Deal, I think the Democrats would have suffered serious losses in the 1934 midterm.  Instead, FDR wisely saved those sorts of reforms for later years.

That's all very well and good, except for two things.  First,  the big difference between FDR 1934 and BHO 2010 isn't whether they focused on the economy -- it's how successful they were.  If the economy was growing at a rapid pace now, as it was during Roosevelt's first two years, then GOP attacks on Obama's main economic actions (the stimulus, the auto bailout, the rest of administering TARP) would be entirely ineffective.  Now, there are lots of reasons why the economy grew more in 1933-1934 than it did over the last two years, only some of which have anything to do with actual policies of the president.  But I think it's impossible to make a case that Obama ignored the economy [see Update below].

Yes, Cost might say, but health care distracted from Obama's message or image of focusing on the economy, while FDR was smart enough to ignore distracting party issues.  But that's not true!  In fact, what the Democrats did as soon as the took office was to launch a major campaign on a social issue that had nothing to do with the economy at all but everything to do with pleasing their urban constituencies.  That's right, one of the very first bills that Roosevelt signed, just days into his presidency, was the repeal of prohibition (in legislative form; passing the 21st Amendment took longer the rest of the year, and of course didn't require presidential action, but was still a case of the Democratic Party focusing on fulfilling a non-economic plank in their party platform.  Oh, and if that's not good enough...guess what else the 73rd Congress did?  How about: gun control! 

Of course, repeal of prohibition was presumably a lot more popular than health care reform (I have no idea how popular machine gun regulation may have been) -- but the ACA would, I believe, be a lot more popular if the economy was growing and Obama was generally more popular.  Cost's continuing theme has been that the unpopularity of health care reform is hurting Obama and the Democrats, but as I've said I think the evidence is stronger that it's the other way around. 

More broadly...as Nyhan's tweet said a lot more concisely than I'm capable of, presidents try to enact their party's platform.  They have to.  Ignoring party priorities is a sure road to disaster for any president.  Of course, that doesn't mean that they never disagree with their party -- see Obama on civil liberties issues -- or that they're always successful in implementing party plans, as Obama has been unsuccessful on climate/energy so far.  Had Obama, however, said in January 2009 that he was going to put off health care and climate, he would have immediately faced a serious revolt from his own party, and might not have even managed to get anything passed through Congress -- and he'd probably now be looking at one or more liberal Senators or governors starting to think that Iowa and New Hampshire are great states to get to know better.  Or, even worse, if he had abandoned health care reform after the August Crazy of 2009 despite having the votes in Congress to pass it, he would have severely injured his reputation, with all sorts of costs down the road.  Presidents do have some ability to manage the party agenda.  If Obama had chosen to emphasize climate instead of health care, Democrats would have gone along...although there's a good chance that neither would have passed, which certainly wouldn't have helped keep rank-and-file Dems happy going into the midterm elections.  To fully reject action on Democratic priorities despite the largest Congressional majorities in a generation?  No president would do that, and no president could do that and retain support of his party.


[Update: see Jay Cost's interesting response below, and my response to him.  I think he may be right that I overstated my description of his position...he certainly hasn't claimed that Obama ignored the economy, just that he and the Dems focused on health care instead of the economy, which isn't quite the same thing, although I disagree about whether he's right about it.]