Gun Control Didn't Ruin Obama's Second Term

Alex Seitz-Wald test-drives what could easily become a new liberal fantasy:

The Connecticut massacre set in motion a cascade of events that led the White House to burn through its only real window to accomplish its goals. The month before the shooting, Obama had won a convincing reelection and a modest popular mandate. One major liberal wish-list entry, immigration reform, seemed not only within reach but almost inevitable.

Instead, not only in this story did Obama's gun control initiative sink immigration reform, but it derailed, at least so far, his entire second term.

C'mon. Let's see...this argument depends on a bunch of stuff: To begin with: that there's such a thing as a mandate (and that Obama had one on immigration), and that "The first few months of any president's term, closest to their electoral win and furthest from the next congressional midterm, are usually the most fruitful." The latter holds for first terms, but as far as I know there's no similar evidence on second terms, and certainly not second terms which also yield continued divided government.

For that matter, the list of reelections with continued divided government is a short one -- in the last hundred years, only 1956, 1972, 1984, and 1996 fit that category before 2012, and of those 1972 wasn't much of a test. I don't think it supports Seitz-Wald's point, either. Just looking at wikipedia...the 99th Congress didn't pass any major bills until December 1985, but passed several, including tax reform, in 1986. Tax reform is as good a comp as any. Reagan sent up his proposal in May 1985; Ways and Means marked up a bill in September through December, 1985 and it passed the House in the same month; Senate Finance finished their markup in May, 1986; the Senate passed it at the end of June; and then after a formal conference in July and August, both chambers passed the bill in September, 1986.

Ike's 85th Congress did pass three major laws in 1955, but several more in 1956. As for Clinton, not too much happened in the 105th (although unlike in Ike's case, the second Congress of Clinton's second term was more productive.

What I think all this says is: the "almost inevitable" was an illusion. Presidents re-elected with continued divided government don't have a Hundred Days, and they basically don't pass partisan initiatives.

Or, to put it another way: whether immigration reform passed was always going to be about what mainstream House conservatives wanted, and they really don't care very much whether Barack Obama's approval rating is at its honeymoon peak of around 51%, or if it's fallen to around 48% (post-gun bill), 46% (after the Senate passed immigration), or 41% (now). Now, if Obama was at 70% that might scare a few moderates, but that wasn't going to happen in winter and spring 2013.

Obama's second term legislative agenda was derailed on election night 2012 when Republicans retained the House. After that, it's just been a question of where to find a few productive compromises that work for both parties.

More broadly, it's just not true that Congress, or even one chamber of Congress, can only do one thing at a time. Even when the bills are going to go through the same committees, it's actually perfectly possible for two or more bills to advance through the process together. Sure, small delays are possible if two bills reach the exact same stage at the exact same time, but usually that's not the case. The more likely explanation for the delay in the immigration bill -- just as with the ACA in 2009 -- is that it takes time for Congress to work its way through complex, contentious bills.

Pass it along: gun safety probably had no effect at all on the rest of Barack Obama's second term.

Dept. of Phony Reagan/Real Reagan Examples

Oy, Bob Woodward:

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief’s decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is “a kind of madness.”

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

I've seen multiple reactions blaming Woodward for suggesting that Barack Obama should, basically, ignore the law -- but so far, none that have actually called him out on the "Reagan" part of this.

Because Ronald Reagan wasn't just told by Congress not to deploy a ship; he was told by Congress to shut down a proxy war. And when he didn't listen, it became a full-blown disaster.

This is the story of the Boland Amendment, in which Congress to shut down a US proxy war in Nicaragua. The US had not only been funding the anti-government "Contras," but the CIA had taken direct action (mining harbors, for example) against Nicaragua. The history of this stuff is pretty complicated, but I think it's fair to say three things. First, the Boland Amendment had a real effect.  In some real and important ways, he followed the law, Woodward's hypothetical Reagan notwithstanding.

On the other hand, he also did attempt to get around the law. The law said that no US money could be spent, so Reagan had the National Security Council staff solicit private and third-country funds for the Contras. The third-party  funding was clearly legal, since it was beyond the scope of Congress. However, the use of NSC staff was not necessarily legal; it was based on a supposed loophole in the law since the NSC wasn't specifically mentioned. Third, however, the Reagan team clearly went beyond the law in the "Iran-Contra" affair by selling arms to the Iranians with the intent of sending the profits to the Contras.

When Iran-Contra was revealed, it was a total disaster for Reagan. His approval ratings suffered a severe and long-lasting hit (about 15 points, basically lasting from late fall 1986 through mid-1988). He lost his Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser. He suffered through major televised hearings exposing various embarrassing Administration details. And a special prosecutor was appointed, who wound up (for better or worse) hounding the administration up until George H.W. Bush issued pardons in 1992.

Now, I usually think about Iran-Contra in the context of "imperial presidency" discussions and argue that the lesson of Iran-Contra is the same as the lesson of Watergate: it is extremely dangerous to a presidency to attempt to act within the Presidential Branch -- in this case, the National Security Council -- instead of through the properly equipped and authorized departments and agencies of the Executive Branch proper.

But of course the more obvious lesson is: Presidents who defy the laws that Congress has passed risk big trouble!

In other words, its not just that Bob Woodward's (current) view of presidential supremacy is both historical and Constitutional nonsense; it's that it's a really, really, really bad idea for presidents who are interested in their own continued influence. For Woodward to blithely assert that presidents should be like Reagan and get around the will of Congress is, well, about as misguided as it gets.

Reagan/Obama

I have a column up over at TAP arguing that it's a mistake for Barack Obama to aspire to being a "liberal Reagan" -- because, well, because politics doesn't work like that. And with some advise on what Obama should do going forward. I think it's a good one, so maybe you will too.

Meanwhile, since I wrote it the "liberal Reagan" pieces keep on coming -- two smart observers, E.J. Dionne and Greg Sargent, each pick up the theme. I'll note a couple of things that go a bit beyond the TAP piece in response.

Dionne says that "Like Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment." It's very, very hard to see a Reagan realignment. Republicans won the presidency in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988; I can't really see 1980 as anything special in that sequence. Or, to put it another way, after Reagan Republicans have won the national presidential vote only in 1988 and 2004. Reagan did come into office with basically a conservative coalition majority in the House, the first one in a while...but it disappeared rapidly in 1982, and didn't reappear until 1994, which was also when Republicans recaptured the Senate after loosing it in 1986. To me, the Congressional story seems more like continuity through 1994, especially on the House side. To put it yet another way: I'm aware of no election study -- or anything else, for that matter -- that gets any explanatory power by using 1980 to help explain things. That is, if you're studying the 1968 election and the 1988 election, you toss in the same things -- economic fundamentals, presidential approval, perhaps candidate factors -- and the results work fine. You don't need to add "oh, and this one was after Reagan" to the 1988 analysis. It won't help.

(I am aware of one similar variable that's been used -- David Mayhew, in his book about divided government, included a variable for a liberal era which, he found, predicted more significant legislation. However, his "activist mood" begins in 1961 and ends in 1976; it's over four years before Reagan wins the White House. Hey, political scientists: if there's anything I'm missing, please let me know).

There has been, to be sure, one development that could be called long-term electoral realignment: the conversion of the bulk of Anglo southerners from conservative Democrats to conservative Republicans. But if anything, Reagan stalled that conversion; at the congressional level, it wound up taking place in one big and fairly permanent surge in 1994. Not in 1980. At the presidential level, meanwhile, it was an ongoing process from the 1940s forward. Reagan didn't delay it as far as I can tell, but he didn't accelerate it, either.

In my view, there's just very little evidence for claiming, as Greg does, that Reagan's presidency was a "turning point in American history" (indeed, Greg says that Reagan's Inaugural speech was the turning point, which is an even harder sell).

There's more of this in the TAP piece, but also, as I said, more on what Obama should actually do rather than trying to be a liberal Reagan (or, in Greg's version, an anti-Reagan).

Monday Movie Post

I haven't been doing these for a while, mostly because I just haven't been watching a lot of political movies lately. Not sure why...part of it is what I've been re-watching with the kids (I suppose you could do a political analysis of Vertigo or Clueless, and I'm certain you could with Chinatown, but I didn't have much interest). I did just re-watch Branagh's As You Like It (which I absolutely love), and it sort of has politics in it, but...well, not especially, I don't think.

At any rate, I did get around to watching a couple of Reagan movies, fortunately -- the second and third of the four Brass Bancroft efforts. First, "Code of the Secret Service," and then "Smashing the Money Ring," both from 1939.

There's hardly anything to "Code" (among other things, it clocks in at just under 60 minutes), but if you want a sense of what the studios saw in Reagan, it's as good as anything. It's pretty clear what Reagan has going for him: he's extremely charming and likable. As a tough guy -- and he has several chases and fights -- he's...well, he's up to it, and throws himself into it as much as he can, but he's mostly charming and likable. "Smashing" is a bit less fun. As far as Reagan, what this one has going for it is that he goes undercover and has to pass as a hardened criminal. Fortunately for him, crooks in 1939 were easily fooled by a scowl and...well, that's about it; Reagan doesn't have much more than that as far as passing for a thug.

Really, the Brass Bancroft movie that you want to see is the final one, Murder in the Air, which was a war picture about a super-scientific death ray. Not because it's the best; I think "Code" was probably a bit better. But because, c'mon, Reagan and a super-scientific death ray. But if you want to know what Reagan the actor was all about and you're flipping past Turner and it's on, I'd say Code of the Secret Service is about as good as anything.

Oh, plus he's in Mexico for almost all of it, so you get to enjoy Hollywood's 1939 version of Mexicans.

Both of these are actually the same year as "Brother Rat," which I've talked about before, but in these Reagan's the star, and he pulls it off perfectly well. Is "Code of the Secret Service" a great movie? Not even close. But, again, if you want to get to know Reagan the youngish actor, it's not a bad choice. And it certainly is better than the one where he played Grover Cleveland Alexander.

Q Day 8: How Did Republicans Get This Way?

EJF asks:

[W]hat are the root historical causes of the current Republican Party dysfunction? When did things start going wrong? Was it 1993?

I don't think we really know, but I think there are two or three reasonable theories.

One is that it's demand-driven. Essentially, there's a very good market that responds strongly to The Crazy. They'll donate for it, they'll buy products of it, they'll listen to or watch shows about it. It's not a huge market, but it's big enough that it creates seriously goofy incentives for Republican politicians and other party leaders -- there's a lot of money in being Rush Limbaugh, so much so that third-rate talentless hacks can make a very good living as pale imitations of what he does.

A second theory is more elite-driven, and is based more or less on the concept of "learning" -- that people tend to copy those things that they perceive of as having worked. Alas for the Republicans, the two big winners over a half-century were...Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich. So if you emulate those two, you're going to wind up with a much worse type of politics than if you emulate, oh, FDR.

But wait -- isn't there also Ronald Reagan? Yup, there is. But for a variety of reasons, Reagan's pragmatism hasn't been much of a model for the GOP. The big thing that they took from Reagan, alas, was that detailed policy knowledge was a net-negative: thus George W. Bush. There is an impulse to find a Reagan -- thus the movement to draft Fred Thompson in 2008 -- but that's about it. Instead, they've invented an ideologue Reagan who never compromised his pure conservative principles, something that Reagan made easy to do because his particular political (and personal) genius was precisely an ability to constantly believe in his own purity regardless of what he had actually done.

As far as when they become dysfunctional, I don't know...I don't think I'd put a clear date on it (although the Gingrich defeat of the Bush budget summit agreement is surely a very big marker). Some of it goes back, perhaps even before Nixon; some of it appears to be much more recent.

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.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Avery Brooks, 64.  I've bashed his performance as Sisko; in his defense, he mostly had to play off of the weaker half of the cast. And the Sisko/Dax friendship is terrific. In other random DS9 comments: my eldest and I think they should have done a spinoff starring Admiral Ross -- a sitcom, in which Ross goes about his day as the world's most boring character while unbeknownst to him all sorts of wacky things are going on. I suppose Troi could make a guest appearance in which she senses that someone is up to something...

Before I get any deeper into it, I better get to the good stuff:

1. Lots of Dartmouth profs talk about the debates.

2. Have to agree with Andrew Gelman on this one. Ronald Reagan was no moderate. Picked the right year to win the nomination; he would have lost in 1968 or 1976.

3. Monica Potts on last night's Warren/Brown debate. She doesn't convey the sense, however, of just how bad David Gregory was.

4. And Steve Kornacki has been doing a great job showing how Mitt Romney's party is constantly cutting off every good option he might have. Today's installment: immigration.

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.

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 Gina Schock, 55. Just watched the Go-Go's concert in Central Park video again the other day: excellent.


A little bit of good stuff:

1. I thought that when I was mostly not listening to Rand Paul I heard him tell the Ronald Reagan's drunk dad story -- and, apparently, he did. Noah Millman notes that it wouldn't have made any more sense had I heard the full (out-of) context.

2.Video fun: Michele Goldberg interviews Jon Voight. 

3. Matt Yglesias looks beyond the question of one plant in one town to ask about overall manufacturing in the Obama era. Good post, but where's the parody song about the Jainsville factory?

Q Day 7: Origins of the GOP War on Budgeting?

A commenter asks:

The GOP War budgeting: when did start, and which pols got the ball rolling?

Another good question.

To link back to some earlier stuff...I suppose it goes back to Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Reagan, because when confronted with policies that added up to bigger budget deficits even though he was a longtime anti-deficit crusader, he was capable of believing that nothing had changed in his positions. And Newt, because he believed in using words that polled well or focused grouped well regardless of whether they had anything to do with underlying policies. And, substantively, because Reagan's flip to embracing supply-side tax cuts and then Newt's role in cementing anti-tax extremism within the party made it necessary to play word games (knowingly or not) in order to remain dedicated to "balanced budgets." I might look, too, at the Ross Perot campaigns, which were extremely heavy on budget deficit talk but entirely empty of deficit reduction planning, other than to automatically oppose any plans that were out there.

Some Republicans during the Bush years played with the notion of giving up the budget rhetoric (Dick Cheney gets cited a lot), but it didn't take, at least for now. I'm not sure, however, whether the real collapse into a war on budgeting comes from the 1980s, the Obama years, or some time between them. If I wanted to research it, I might look at the rhetoric surrounding the George H.W. Bush budget deal and then the Clinton budget package in 1993.

"Even Ronald Reagan"???

Yes, I know that GOP Reagan worship is strong, but really -- do Republicans now simply assume that Ronald Reagan was the Greatest President Ever? Really?

I ask, because (via Benen) of a new Mitt Romney ad bashing Barack Obama for claiming to be one of the greatest four presidents (which, natch, Obama never said, as Benen points out, but that's not the point here). The narrator says that Obama's claim is that he's better than "George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and even Ronald Reagan" (my emphasis).

Parsing that, it seems that the Romney campaign is asserting, or perhaps assuming, that claiming to be better than Ronald Reagan is a stronger claim than claiming to be better than George Washington. Right? That's what the "even" is doing there.

Do Republicans really think that Ronald Reagan was a greater president than George Washington? I guess so. What I'm really wondering, however, is whether that ad really was aimed for a general election audience. Does Team Romney really think that anyone outside of partisan Republicans thinks of Reagan as a greater president than Washington?

Granted, it's just a tiny point about an ad that hardly anyone (I assume) will see. Still, if anyone is looking for hints that Republicans are trapped in a feedback loop, this is the kind of evidence that goes into the pile.

(In case you're wondering: Lincoln was presumably omitted from the ad because Obama's original comment mentioned Lincoln, and thus Obama supposedly wasn't claiming to be greater than him).

Update: yet another awful typo, or whatever you call it when you put the wrong word in, fixed.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question as the question for conservatives: has the last thirty years been one in which conservatives dominated US politics and policy? Has it been, in other words, the Reagan era? And if so, did that end in 2006 and 2008, or are we still in the Reagan era?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

This one was sparked by a new record-length discussion thread here at Plain Blog that spun off from my comments about Drew Westen during the week. In particular, I'm interested in the question of whether conservatives and liberals believe that the years beginning in 1980 were in fact an era of conservative triumph, either ending in 2006 and 2008, or perhaps continuing right up to the present.

So, how do you think of the last 30 years of American politics? Has it been a Reagan era, with conservative policies winning? Or has it basically been a liberal era, despite occasional Republican electoral victories? If in between, is it closer to one than the other? And if it was a conservative era, is it still, or did it end with Barack Obama's presidency?

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.

Reagan Would Crush This Group

Steve Benen argues today that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be able to win the Republican nomination today, because today's GOP has swerved so far to the right that many of Reagan's policies (arms control treaties, raising the debt limit, tax increases, and more) would leave him as a moderate RINO. And he's right about the issues (and, indeed, Reagan frequently took hits from his right while in office; it was probably closely comparable to what Barack Obama receives from his left these days).

However, while a good piece of rhetoric, that sort of analysis mistakes, I think, the way that issues and ideology actually work. It's not that Ronald Reagan was seen as a conservative icon in 1980 and won the nomination because he rigorously held conservative positions on all issues; it's that Reagan won the nomination because he was a conservative icon, and people who thought of themselves as conservatives adopted his issue positions because he held them. That's easiest to see on taxes and budget deficits. Up until the late 1970s, standard conservative orthodoxy held that budget deficits were Bad Indeed -- and it wasn't just lip service. They actually cared about deficits, so much so that they opposed Democratic tax cuts and Democratic defense budget increases. When Reagan adopted supply-side policies, that all changed (despite the plain fact that Reagan did actually accept various tax increases), and tax cutting became the new conservative orthodoxy.

Of course, there are always dissenters, even when a Reagan-like figure happens to be around (Ted Kennedy played a similar role on the liberal side). But very little of that criticism from real ideologues filters down to rank-and-file voters, or to most of the more practical party actors. Unless, that is, they're looking for an excuse to distance themselves anyway.

What's happening now is twofold. First, in the absence of a Reagan-like figure, what counts as "conservative" is  up for grabs. And, at the same time, the particular set of presidential candidates in both the 2008 and 2012 cycles have reinforced the confusion, because all of them have entered the contests with serious blemishes on their record of adhering to conservative orthodoxy (other than a few safely conservative candidates, such as Rick Santorum this time around, who have other problems that keep them from being plausible nominees).

Since Reagan didn't have that problem, he'd mop the floor with this group. And in doing so he'd let the party know what being conservative meant, and pretty much everyone on the Republican side would go along with that.

Either Side of the Same Town

Speaking of constraints on the presidency (and, yes, that is a favorite topic around here, isn't it)...Brad Plumer had a wonderful history of the gas tax today that I highly recommend, but I do have one complaint. Plumer tells how in September 1982 Ronald Reagan was strongly opposed to increases in the gas tax, but following the Democratic victories in November that year resurgent House Democrats moved to pass the increase and Reagan ran out ahead of the parade and championed it.

So that's the first telling. But by the last paragraph Plumer refers to it as "do what Ronald Reagan did and just raise the gas tax." Wait -- that's not the story at all. If Reagan had the votes -- say, if the 1982 elections bounce the other way -- surely he would have stuck with his original conviction and opposed the increase. This is exactly the point that I was making last week about George W. Bush: it's extremely tricky to attribute influence to presidents, and it's important not to assume that whatever happens must have been their accomplishment.

I don't think Plumer really thinks that Reagan increased the gas tax; he realizes it was Congress, or Democrats in Congress, or Dan Rostenkowski, who really deserves the credit or the blame. It's juts the convention we have; that's how we talk about politics, that everything the United States government did from January 1981 to January 1989 was something Ronald Reagan did -- and everything the government has done since January 2009 is something Barack Obama did. Hey, I catch myself doing it all the time, and I'm one of the biggest critics of it.

A Little Friday Counterfactual Fun

I did one item already on Hubert Humphrey, but I hope you won't mind a second one. Nelson W. Polsby did an edited volume of counterfactuals once, and his contribution was "What If Robert Kennedy Had Not Been Assassinated?" It's been a while since I read it, and it doesn't seem to be readily available through a bit of googling (or, alas, on my bookshelf),  but the basic story Nelson told was that Humphrey would have won the nomination; would have offered the VP slot to Kennedy; and Kennedy, being among other things thoroughly a politician, would have accepted. The Democratic Party thus unified, Humphrey/Kennedy go on to defeat Nixon, and all sorts of good things (including, perhaps most importantly, a relatively quick exit from Vietnam) ensue.

That's what I remember from the essay, and I think it's all quite likely. One of Humphrey's problems in 1968 was that he was trapped by the prospect of LBJ withdrawing support; with Kennedy on his side, not only would many antiwar Democrats have been a lot more favorably disposed towards him even without any other changes, but at least in my opinion he would have had a lot more leverage to ignore Johnson. As it was, Humphrey wound up very close in the popular vote but down 301-191 in the electoral college (with Wallace taking 46 electoral votes). A three-point swing in each state would have brought Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Alaska, and (just barely) Illinois to Humphrey for 74 additional EV and a 265-227 lead. California, which Nixon held by 3.08%, would have put Humphrey over the top without going to the House. There's no way to prove anything one way or another, of course, and usually VPs don't make any difference at all -- but in this particular counterfactual, I think it's at least plausible that Humphrey/Bobby does three-plus points better than Humphrey/Muskie.

Now, I don't remember what Nelson speculated down the road, if anything, other than as a long-time Humphrey supporter he certainly thought HHH would be a good president. Just for fun, though...it's easy to imagine the oil shock followed by the deep 1974-1975 recession giving a somewhat younger Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1976 over Vice President Bobby Kennedy, perhaps with a GOP Congress (no Watergate landslide in 1974, for one thing). After that...well, I guess it depends on what you really think of Reagan. It's easy to argue that a pre-Laffer, younger, Reagan serves a couple of successful terms and actually establishes the GOP as a majority party for a while. On the other hand, it's also possible to imagine Reagan having a miserable time with the same things that Jimmy Carter couldn't handle, and Democrats reviving in 1978 and 1980.

But wait! I cheated a bit there; I ignored the 1972 election. I'm stipulating that Humphrey is pretty good at the presidency, and if so (and given what else we know) it's likely that he wins a major landslide in 1972. Over who? Most likely, Ronald Reagan, then halfway through his second term in California, and the clear conservative champion. It's true that in this alternative history the nomination process hadn't been reformed in the same way, but it's very hard for me to see Rockefeller or someone from the liberal wing winning, and I'm not sure who was available to succeed Nixon as the person who was tolerable to both sides. Maybe Reagan sees the writing on the wall and waits until 1976, but I doubt it. I say he runs, gets the nomination, and is totally clobbered.

And you know what? A history in which Goldwater and Reagan get clobbered (plus Nixon, originally from the conservative wing, losing two close elections) might just be enough to shift things around considerably. How? I have no idea. Perhaps it's Howard Baker or someone like that who becomes president in 1976, and Republicans evolve into a moderate conservative party with Reaganites marginalized, and wind up with a long-term majority instead of the deadlock that actually happened after 1980. Perhaps a true three party system emerges, with a southern-based, Wallacite Conservative Party replacing the Southern Democrats. Maybe then Republicans wind up relatively isolationist and libertarian, while Democrats keep serious Cold Warriors in the fold. Who knows?

I'm enjoying the comments over on the other Humphrey post, and I can't wait to see what y'all say on this one.

Paging Ahistorical Nonsense!

Via Goddard, NBC's First Read:

Republicans had a field day yesterday with the president’s appearance on ESPN, laying out his NCAA bracket and then attending a DNC event for big-money fundraisers at a Washington hotel last night at a time when Japan is in a nuclear crisis and the situation in Libya remains dire. It’s notable that the ESPN appearance was the president’s only one of the day, and that they ironically canceled an event in which the president was to receive an award in conjunction with “Sunshine Week,” to promote government transparency...[T]hey should be aware that perception could become reality for swing voters, especially if some of this starts landing in late-night monologues; the last few days haven't been stellar ones for those in charge of Obama's presidential image. Paging Michael Deaver?

Michael Deaver, as young'ns might not recall, was Ronald Reagan's first-term imagemeister. Ronald Reagan, as First Read should but doesn't recall, wasn't very popular during much of his first term; in fact, in March 1983, Reagan was quite a bit less popular than Barack Obama is now (Obama's Gallup approval ratings have been in the mid-to-high 40s this month; Reagan had just crossed into the low 40s, after falling south of 40% earlier in 1983. For exact numbers: Obama was at 48% on yesterday's reading, while Reagan was at 41% at the equivalent point). The truth is that Reagan's popularity or lack thereof had a lot more to do with events, especially the economy, than it had to do with whatever Michael Deaver was up to.

The specific complaint here -- showing up on ESPN, picking winners in college basketball -- has got to be a classic example of pundits getting cause and effect backwards. Surely, if things go well for Obama, then his forays into hoops punditry will be taken as evidence that he's well-connected to ordinary voters, that he's comfortable in his own skin, that he has the common touch. If things go badly for him, then it will be evidence that he's lost his focus, that he's flailing for positive attention, etc. Just as presidential actions are "firm" or "resolute" when things are going well but "stubborn" when they're not.

Hack punditry, at its worst.