Senior Funeral Exploiter

I don't really have anything to say about this, other than to say that it's not the first time. Or the second time. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that there is, somewhere (at the RNC? Fox News?) a Senior Funeral Exploiter whose job it is to carefully monitor all funerals, memorial services, and other potentially solemn occasions in which Democratic politicians are expected to attend with the goal of finding some "inappropriate" behavior. And once it's identified, it spreads rapidly through the GOP-aligned press.

The classics of the genre are the Paul Wellstone funeral, and Bill Clinton at the Ron Brown funeral. I seem to recall others, too, but don't have any handy citations.The Ron Brown one was classic...Republicans basically spent all eight years of the Clinton Administration trying to get everyone to accept what they thought was self-evidently true, that Clinton was a phony and a usurper; "catching" him "faking" grief at Brown's funeral, they thought, would convince everyone. Oh well.

Anyway, what I wonder about it, as I tend to do about these things, is whether this is supply or demand driven. Is there something about the consumers in the conservative marketplace that makes Funeral Exploitation particularly lucrative? Or is this something that conservative elites just are certain will resonate, and so they're constantly pushing it. 

I don't recall any equivalent on the other side; please remind me if I missed anything. Surely Democrats have exploited similar "gaffes," but none of them I can think of were funeral-based. 

So I have no idea of why the pattern exists, although I'm pretty sure it's not about Democrats actually being a bunch of rude jerks (I assume good manners are equally distributed among politicians). Ideas?

Pause, Then Politicize

After Mandela died last week, Dave Weigel wrote an item telling people to "Go Ahead, Politicize Mandela"in response to some twitter requests to cut out the partisan sniping for a while.

I'm sympathetic to that point of view...but I also think there's an etiquette issue here, too, as I also said a while ago. And I think that for at least a short while -- a pause -- the etiquette issue deserves precedence over the politics.

Basically, it's polite to wait a short bit before jumping into partisan or other political point-scoring, and people should be polite.

I want to emphasize: short bit. I'm talking pause, not some sort of long-term ban. I agree that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using any event as an excuse to score partisan points or to press a political argument. Politics is important! Those who want to take action don't need to apologize for it.

However, etiquette tells us that we should act as if we respect the feelings of others, and of those feelings one would have to think that grief ranks pretty high up. Mourning is not in itself political, even if the person being mourned was intensely political; even if, as happens in some cases, the cause of death was intensely political. Those of us who live in a political world should remember that not everyone does, and that it may be particularly crass and hurtful to have to deal with that stuff along with one's grief.

I have no rule of thumb for how long a pause is appropriate. Certainly long enough that one's first encounter with, say, a natural disaster isn't going to be a slam at the president (or the Speaker, or whoever) for supposedly causing it. And certainly not so long that the media spotlight has moved on. I'm thinking hours, not days.

But yeah. Really, your Very Important Point about Ronald Reagan and Nelson Mandela could probably wait six hours, or even to the next day, without overly diminishing whatever positive effect you wanted to get out of it; you didn't need to post it on that first day. Even if you think it's outrageous that some conservatives could profess to be mourning Mandela without renouncing Reagan. There's plenty of time for that on the second day, or at least the fourth hour. The same applies to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and whatever else sparks this kind of thing. You aren't going to be sacrificing any important political advantage if you hold off at least as long as it takes for the press to get the basic facts figured out.

After that, though? Absolutely have at it. After all, all of us live in a political world, whether we realize it or not, and after a point pretending that we all agree about everything ceases to be polite and is, instead, just condescending.

Where is the line? I don't think there's a hard-and-fast answer to that. It depends on the medium, on the occasion, on the tone...lots of stuff. The point is to balance two equally worthy things: the respect that mourning and grief deserve, and the virtue in action. Etiquette rules and norms generally help us get through tough calls in these areas, but we don't have much to help us (and certainly not on twitter), so we need to muddle through. Look: there are plenty of things I'd say about a colleague or acquaintance after she passed away to an outside friend who didn't know the deceased that I would never in a million years say to her family members at the funeral. Given that there are few recognized rules, all we can do is to try to be sensitive -- without shortchanging the rest of it.

So what I have is Pause, then Politicize. Okay?

Catch of the Day

Kevin Drum is absolutely right in his response to Lori Montgomery's WaPo story today about budget negotiations:

There's nothing wrong with talking about the federal deficit in a story about the budget. But this entire story is framed around a sense of dismay that Congress has "abandoned" its debt-reduction goals. This is done with no mention of the fact that Congress has already slashed the 10-year deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the past couple of years. No mention that we've been engaged in this frenzy of deficit cutting despite the fact that the economy is still fragile, which means that reducing the deficit is almost certainly a terrible idea. No mention that deficit cutting of any size in the wake of recession is unprecedented in recent history.

Basically, there are two problems with Montgomery's piece. First, that she ignores previous deficit-cutting from this and previous Congresses; second, that he takes the position that deficit-cutting is unambiguously a good thing, now and always.

I'll add one thing: she uses "debt" and "deficit" in ways that obscure what's going on. So, for example, she begins by saying the prospective deal would "not significantly reduce the debt." Well, yes; that's not going to happen unless the government runs surpluses. While there are some who believe that would be a good idea, most economists, including many sincere deficit hawks (who do want both short and long-term deficits slashed), would not want the debt reduced next year.

Matt Yglesias is on this too, and he's right also: "Journalists who would never think of openly cheerleading for more people to get government-subsidized health insurance or for oil companies to secure a freer hand in drilling, regard the goodness of deficit reduction as a kind of non-ideological given."

Yglesias asks why that's the case. My guess? Reagan. Because Ronald Reagan's policies produced huge deficits, and his influence pushed future Republicans to adopt policies which produced huge deficits, the Democratic Party shifted to a mostly fiscally conservative party. And yet because Reagan's particular political genius lie in believing what he wanted to believe regardless of what was going on, under Reagan conservatives became even more rhetorically committed to balanced budgets and deficit obsession.

Which leaves both parties rhetorically, at least, committed to hating deficits and debt. And the norm for journalists is that if both parties support something, then it's okay to treat it as an unquestioned and unquestionable good thing.

Of course, there are plenty of liberals who don't always support balanced budgets, and a handful of conservatives who are honest about the effects of their policies. But on both sides, the bulk of the official messaging assumes that deficit reduction is always a good thing.

On the other hand, it's possible that reporter love of deficit reduction precedes the partisan (rhetorical) consensus on deficit reduction, in which case it's possible that one reason the parties adopted that stance is because they believed it would play better in the press. (I suppose I should note here, too, FDR's 1932 anti-deficit campaign rhetoric). So perhaps a more careful examination of this is in order.

At any rate: nice catch!

Elsewhere: Zombie Rubio, Budget Showdown, more

My TAP column this week was a caution flag to the press to stop burying presidential candidates too soon; my editor over there took a fairly dry piece and added zombies to the headline...and an awesome URL.

Today at PP I reminded everyone, again, that the bottom line in government funding negotiations is that eventually there will be a deal. I've made this point repeatedly, but I have a new formulation of it today: the choice isn't deal or shutdown; it's deal or shutdown and deal.

Let's see...earlier, I said that if there's a White House problem that needs to be fixed by personnel changes, it's a substance problem, not a spin problem.

More on the invisible primary, and one of my favorite topics, which is figuring out who is a candidate and who is not, this time pegged to Elizabeth Warren: my suggestion is to watch what they do, not what they say.

And I know I already linked to this one, but why not repeat it: the case for health care re-emerging as a normal political issue.

In Defense of Partisan Hack Pundits

Jonathan Chait argued something yesterday that I think is wrong:

[L]et me reveal a couple professional secrets here. Intellectual consistency is a basic value for political commentators. You want to be sure your strongly held views are the product of an actual philosophy, because the temptation to see events through the prism of partisan bias is strong.

He says this to put the hurt on Charles Krauthammer's flip on the filibuster and the nuclear option between the Bush-era Senate showdown and the recent Obama-era version.

Intellectual consistency is a basic value, perhaps, for some political commentators. But I'm not sure it's necessary for all political commentators.

Put it this way. I might read Chait because I care what Jonathan Chait thinks about things. In fact, I do; he's a smart guy, and a fun writer.

But one also might seek out political commentators in order to hear the best, good-faith arguments for and against something that's in the news. For that, I want someone who reliably supports one side of the partisan divide (or perhaps one ideological strain). I still don't want phony arguments; that's why I didn't title this "In Defense of Krauthammer," because I generally don't think he supplies strong, honest arguments. There's still a requirement for serious intellectual integrity, even for partisan arguments.

I think Chait is talking about something like a "public intellectual" model, and what I'd say is that there's also room for a lawyer model. For a lawyer-model pundit, it doesn't matter so much if she said the exact opposite thing five years ago, but it still matters a lot if she gets her facts right and makes well-reasoned, well-informed, arguments.

I guess the question is whether there's really any need for lawyer-style commentators, given that it's the professional responsibility of many politicians to essentially do that. I'd say: sure. Commentators, as opposed to politicians or their staff, are relatively free to make the argument properly, without having to worry about the political fallout from the various speed traps and potholes that politicians have to shy away from -- or from winning daily spin wars.

Granted, it's unlikely that anyone is going to identify himself as a lawyer-style commentator. And yes, one tip-off that Krauthammer isn't worth bothering with is his extreme certainty that he's correct, even as (as Chait notes) he flips from one side to another of an issue based on partisan tides. But overall, there's probably a lot more room for good lawyer-style pundits than Chait thinks.

Myths, Myths, Myths

I did an item today about today's calls for Obama to start firing people willy-nilly that was probably not nearly harsh enough. But the one thing I left out that I really want to get to is yet another myth about a previous president.

No, not the one about second-term presidents never recovering if their approval sinks; I saw that again today, but I've already handled that one.

It's this one (my emphasis):

“I don’t know where the breakdown occurred on that, but it’s Obama’s ‘no new taxes’ moment,” the official said, referring to the broken promise that is widely seen as having cost President George H.W. Bush a second term.

Hogwash! What cost George H.W. Bush a second term was a poorly timed recession. That's all.

Bush breaking his tax pledge was a story in June through October 1990. Look at his approval ratings: it's hard to make much of it. In particular, this all happened before the Gulf War, which relegated it to ancient history. One can argue that it hurt Bush in the long run by destroying trust in him, but that certainly didn't seem to have any effect at all in spring 1991. Only when the economy turned south did his approval ratings follow.

I suspect that for the neutral press, this is a close relative of the equally untrue myth that Ross Perot cost Bush the election. Why? Because after three consecutive solid Republican victories, by 1992 most Republicans believed the myth of a GOP "electoral lock" and therefore were open to bogus explanations of something which actually didn't need much explanation at all beyond the obvious one that incumbent presidents usually lose re-election if there's a recession in the second half of their term. What distinguishes this one, I'm sure, is that a faction of the Republican Party is intensely interested in convincing everyone that higher taxes ruined Bush's presidency, while pretty much no one else cares.

At any rate, at best breaking the pledge was a very minor factor in the 1992 election, and most likely it had no effect at all. Moreover, to the extent that it hurt at all, it may well have been because of how central, high-profile, and specific the pledge was in Bush's 1988 campaign. I'd guess it's easily in the top 1% of all campaign pledges ever if all those factors are combined, and pretty high up there as far as how high-profile and absolute the breaking of it was. Really, however, it likely made no difference at all in 1992.

One More Time on Subsamples (Ignore Those Polls! Addendum)

Last week I took someone to task for placing too much weight on Gallup's reports of Latino voters supposedly disproportionate turn away from Barack Obama. One week more, and...it's disappearing even more. In the Gallup weekly reports, Obama trickled down to 40% approval overall after three weeks at 41%, but his approval among Hispanic citizens is up for the third week in a row and now stands at 54%, 14 points higher than his overall rating. That's consistent with where he was back in September (that is, it's down, but not down more than the overall dip).

It's certainly possible that there's something going on here, but it's also possible, and perhaps a bit more likely, that the earlier dip never actually happened. It was just a bit of random variation.

I wanted to post on this not to beat up on the same thing, but because there's one additional point I didn't mention which is actually pretty important. Gallup publishes, in their weekly reports, a colossal 41 different splits. Look: flip a single coin 1000 times, and if heads comes up 600 times, something is probably going on. But what you're doing here is walking into a coin flipping factory, with some flipped 1000 times, and some 100 times, and some only 10 times, and yeah, if all you are doing are looking for oddball results then you're going to find what you're looking for. 

And so, like clockwork, we have another reporter tweeting out that "Obama's approval has dropped the sharpest among Eastern wealthy post-grads." Give it a rest, folks: just don't trust these blips in the crosstabs. There's no way of knowing whether they're real or not. 

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Ming-Na Wen, 50.

Good stuff:

1. Sean Trende is right about ACA and the future of liberalism.

2. Adam Serwer on closing Gitmo.

3. Potentially big good news: CMS is now saying that they've fixed "two-thirds of the high priority bugs responsible with issues with 834 transactions." This is about the crucial communications between the exchanges and insurance companies, and it was an even bigger problem in October than the visible problems at Healthcare.gov. On the other hand? They're apparently nowhere close to being ready to pay subsidies to insurance companies. But delaying that will just be costly; the 834s could be a system-destroying disaster. Sarah Kliff is covering the daily ACA updates.

4. Scott Lemieux with the case against judicial filibusters. I (more or less) disagree, but the more practical issue here isn't really about whether filibusters are good for democracy or liberals or conservatives; it's that they're good for individual Senators, and (again, like it or not) they're going to be reluctant to surrender them.

5. And Brendan Nyhan on the ACA press frenzy.

Obamacare Press Frenzy Stuff

Oy, Kraushaar. Oy, Galston. Oy, half the damn press corps. It's ugly out there, folks.

The two that set me off in particular today are Josh Kraushaar's massive overinterpretation of the events of last week, leading him to believe that Democrats are close to abandoning the ACA. And then Todd Purdom on the imminent collapse of "Big Government progressivism" if the ACA doesn't work well (complete with supporting quotes from William Galston). Anyway, here are some links to what I've written in response.

There's just a lot of nonsense right now. Which is pretty much what happens when these press frenzies get started, but it's very frustrating. As I wrote over at Salon over the weekend, a good comparison here is Whitewater, of all things; yes, there is a substantive story on health care reform here, but what the press are up to is mostly just fantasy.

Today, I took on Kraushaar's argument that the Upton vote was about Democrats turning against the ACA. As I said last week...no, it really isn't.

Oh, and then there's the "doom for liberalism" argument. On Friday, I pointed out that public opinion doesn't work that way.

I'll dredge up a couple of other relevant posts from a while back. At the beginning of the month, I argued that "repeal" really is dead; the status quo ante has been disrupted far too much to ever return to it. Whatever happens in the future, it will be building on the new, ACA status quo, not repealing it and returning to the past arrangements. And I've also been saying that the spin at this point is irrelevant; what matters is whether the law works.

Catch of the Day

I missed this for some reason earlier in the week, but Brendan Nyhan had a point I agree with completely with regard to this week's sudden obsession with Barack Obama's old claim that everyone would be able to keep their current insurance under ACA:

Another possible explanation for the lack of scrutiny given to Obama’s promises is that the press often takes its cues about the flaws in a policy from the opposition party, which is part of a pattern of indexing coverage to the range of debate among political elites. In this case, conservative politicians and pundits often emphasized baseless charges like “death panels” or made speculative claims about how it is intended to undermine employer-provided insurance.

This coverage failure underscores the need for a vocal and reality-based opposition. Just as the divided Democratic opposition undermined the prominence of experts in weapons control during the debate over Iraq, Obama’s free pass on “you can keep it” illustrates how skeptical reporting depends on the combination of technical policy critiques and attention from opposition elites. If either component is absent, journalists are all too likely to miss the story.

It would be nice if reporters were self-starters who could scrutinize politician claims, figure out on their own which ones were iffy, and then nail them down. Of course, some reporters do that! But even in that world, part of the job of reporters would be to report on the claims of both parties, not just the administration. And therefore false claims about the ACA from Republicans (and not just death panels; there was the 10/4 claim, and the one about thousands of IRS agents, and of course the central one about a "government takeover) tended to drive out other reporting.

Moreover, sensible reporters who were aware of multiple false or phony claims from Republicans would be understandably less likely to pay attention to subsequent claims that might have actually been true.

It's not just health care reform, of course. Drones, for example: Republicans who are constantly concocting new Benghazi! stories are not only failing to push the press to work harder on the questions surrounding drone wars, but are taking up space that could be spent on it.

It's an important point. And: nice catch!

Catch of the Day

Here's one for Jaime Fuller, who tells us about "The Inside the Beltway Center for Presidents Who Can't Lead Good." It's a great item, chock full of links to all the totally excellent advice that pundits have been giving Barack Obama, everything from "stop golfing" to "grow a beard."

That last one was probably not fair; I'm pretty sure Alex Seitz-Wald didn't really think it would solve Obama's problems, much less the nation's. But the rest? Fair game!

Okay, I don't really have more to say about this; I just really enjoyed the list and the title (I should also probably note that Fuller is my editor these days over at TAP, but that doesn't have anything to do with this CotD! All of you finalists who lost out? Yours just wasn't Catchy enough). Hey, it's something of a holiday today, so why not enjoy a fun one.

And of course: nice catch!

Of Course McConnell Has Blocked the Senate 400 Times

Earlier this week, Glenn Kessler wrote one of the puzzling fact-check columns I've seen in a while. It was over a claim by Democratic challenger Allison Lundergan Grimes that Mitch McConnell has "blocked the Senate over 400 times."

And right up until the final two paragraphs, it was a fine column; in fact, I'd say it was an excellent, first-rate job. Up to those final two paragraphs.

Kessler makes a number of good points. He recognizes that cloture votes and filibusters are not the same thing. Correct! He recognizes that some cloture votes fail. Correct! And he gets the key point:

Some political scientists have argued that in effect, with 60 votes required for passage on almost any bill, a filibuster is in place for every piece of legislation.

By this logic, counting cloture motions is a very poor substitute for counting filibusters — and that’s why an anecdotal feeling that the Senate is snarled does not show up in the raw statistics.

If you're wondering, that "have argued" would be me, and the "some political scientists" is Sarah Binder, who said in the linked item: "First, let’s put to rest the debate about whether insisting on sixty votes to cut off debate on a nomination is a filibuster or, at a minimum, a threatened filibuster.  It is."

Now, Kessler also makes the reasonable point that attributing all these filibusters to McConnell in particular is at least open to argument.

Anyway, up to that point, it's an excellent item. And not just because he cited me! It's a very complicated topic, and he lays it out in what seems to me to be an accurate and easy to understand way.

Given all of that, I think there are two reasonable ways Kessler could have concluded. One is to just say that everything is filibustered, McConnell is Minority Leader and therefore bears at least some responsibility each time, and so yes, the hit is accurate. In my view, that would have been the best choice. The other -- and I would have had very little problem with it -- is to say that counting filibusters turns out to be very difficult, and whether McConnell "blocked" the Senate 400 times depends on interpreting things that can legitimately be interpreted multiple ways, and therefore the best thing to do is to lay out the facts and stop there with no rating.

Instead, I was absolutely shocked that he finished:

In any case, the Grimes campaign made an elemental error in not understanding the difference between “filibusters” and “blocking” action in the Senate. A number of the cloture motions that Reid has filed were intended to speed things up, to suit his parliamentary preferences, rather than in response to something McConnell specifically had done.

The Grimes campaign might have been on stronger ground if it offered specific examples of what it considered obstruction by McConnell. But, as a matter of math and basic understanding of Senate procedure, this ad falls short.

Three Pinocchios

(That's three on a scale of one-to-four, with three being "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions").

I don't get it at all. I think what he's saying is that to "block" something is to prevent its passage, as opposed to just delaying it. But surely that's not the only plausible definition of "block" in that context. And at any rate, it's very possible that Republicans have blocked 400 things during the Obama era, if one counts items which never reached the floor thanks to a filibuster.

At any rate, just for the record, once again: Republicans have created a 60 vote Senate in which virtually every item is filibustered. That was never the case before January 2009; it's been the case ever since. 

Oy, Fournier

This is what happens when the two parties ruling Washington lose touch with America and pander to their crazy-extreme bases: President Obama's competency and personality ratings are nose-diving, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll; barely a sliver of the public thinks highly of the Republican Party; and two-thirds of Americans want to replace their own member of Congress.  

This is what happens when a reporter is obsessed with insisting that the two parties are mirror images of each other: he manages to miss what may be a real story because he's so intent on serving up a pre-baked conclusion.

Actually Ron Fournier manages to demonstrate a whole bundle of Worst Practices in this one.

First, he treats the NBC/WSJ poll in a vacuum. Obama received his worst-ever approval here, but the 42% isn't anything special across all polls in terms of an all-time low, so highlighting it is probably misleading.

Second: It's also likely that the five point drop registered in this poll compared to one in the first week of October is flukish, as a check of the HuffPollster numbers would suggest. I'm not sure moving from 47 to 42 is a "dramatic decline" even if real, but the odds are that most of that is just random movement, not reality. HuffPollster's current approval estimate is 43%, down a small fraction of a percentage point since that earlier NBC/WSJ sounding.

Third: Fournier "explains" this "dramatic decline" purely in terms of Obama's choosing to listen to his "base" and not median voters. But if some of the drop (and over several months, there has definitely been a drop -- and perhaps the drop is really concentrated in October) is about ACA rollout, is that really about catering to his strongest supporters? I'd say it's more about mismanagement. Fournier suggests that NSA and Syria could be part of the problem (and never mind that the Syria thing and most of the NSA thing preceded that early October poll); if so, that certainly has nothing to do with being overly focused on keeping liberals happy. More likely, in my view? The long-term decline matches nicely with the long-term decline, since the end of May, of Gallup's economic confidence index -- in other words, this could be about the economy. And, if I had to guess, sequestration.

Fourth: There's also the question of whether those "crazy-extreme" bases are in fact crazy and/or extreme. It matters! It's absolutely true that strong Democratic voters have strong views on, say, health care reform and want the ACA to succeed, and that does impose constraints on a Democratic president. But that's not the same as the constraints imposed by Tea Party radicals who wanted Republicans to shut down the government until ACA was defunded, while also expecting to blame Obama for the shutdown. I'd probably also argue that the influential parts of the Democratic Party are less "extreme" than the influential parts of the Republican Party, but it's quite important to be aware that Democratic-leaning crazies have basically zero influence within their party, while GOP-leaning crazies have quite a bit. Which may well have something to do with the terrible polling Republicans are getting.

Indeed, to the extent that "Crazies are destroying your party" (the headline to the piece, so probably not his fault, but it accurately captures what he's saying), what's probably happening is that the Ted Cruz/Louie Gohmert crazies who pushed the shutdown are hurting the approval ratings of both parties.

Fifth: I don't think I got around to linking to a fun guide to anonymous Washington sources that Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins did earlier this week -- it's excellent! At any rate, it was fun to read Fournier's column, which attributes lots of weight to "a Democratic operative who works with the White House" and a "GOP operative who also requested anonymity." Let's just say that Grim and Linkins weren't exactly impressed with those credentials.

Hey: just this morning, I praised Josh Kraushaar (who I've been hard on in the past) for an excellent column. I'd much rather be doing that! I'd much rather be pointing out Best Practices columns than this Worst Practices one (maybe I should do an Oi! item for good examples). This junk, though? Oy.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mike Napoli, 32. Better than Vernon Wells! Better than Frank Francisco! And congrats to the Red Sox...I'll miss having the Giants as World Series Champions, though. But it was fun while it lasted (again).

Before the good stuff, one other note: Thank you, everyone -- record traffic month at Plain Blog!

1. Norm Ornstein on the right to vote.

2. Meanwhile, Arizona will be voting on voting, as Reid Wilson reports.

3. John Sides passes along some new research on the effect of the Fox News original rollout. I'd be very careful about extrapolating too far from this...but it's worth knowing about.

4. Garance Franke-Ruta explains why delaying ACA is impractical at this point -- although I'll note that if the web site doesn't get fixed relatively soon, it may turn out to be the least-bad option.

5. I give Josh Kraushaar a hard time often, but I think his column on VA-GOV is a pretty good example of how to write about single elections in the context of national elections. He doesn't overplay it; instead, he talks about it in the context of national trends and issues, but without making claims about "what this means" that wouldn't hold up.

6. Back to the Red Sox: Dan Drezner teases John Sides.

Catch of the Day

Great post from Dan Hopkins about how a belief that "messaging" works gets politicians into trouble.

What I've become interested in are the incentives for politicians to believe the myth. There are a couple of things going on here, I think.

One is to recognize the distinction between candidates and candidacies and the analogous distinction between elected officials and their full operation, their offices (we don't really even have a proper word for that one). Within those candidacies/offices, there are a number of people -- the communications operation, probably polling, media, maybe more) who have a direct interest in believing that the words that politicians say have a direct effect on public opinion in a way that really matters.

The other one is about efficacy.

In some situations -- campaigns, in particular -- "messaging" actually does have some marginal utility, and while it's only on the margins, it's one thing that is actually within the control of the candidates, so they might as well do it as well as possible.

But even when it has no effect whatsoever on  public opinion, it's likely to produce tangible results. Take for example the House mini-CRs during the shutdown, or the First and Second Battles of the World War II Memorial. We know that they were utterly unsuccessful at moving public opinion. However, they also were heavily reported, especially within the GOP-aligned press. In other words, they had tangible effects, even if they didn't actually have meaningful effects. And within most organizations (and remember, House offices, Senate offices, political parties, the White House, campaigns, and federal agencies are all organizations), tangible accomplishments tend to be rewarded. Even if tangible may not, at the end of the day, be as substantive as something else which doesn't have any visible gain that one can point to.

And as I've said, I think this is particularly a problem for Republicans, both because their party-aligned press is a bigger deal, and because it is generally even more accepting of GOP spin than the Democratic-aligned press is. Which means that GOP spin becomes tangible more easily, which should mean, all else equal, that Republicans will be even more susceptible to the trouble that Hopkins talks about than Democrats will be.

Also: Nice catch!

Here Comes the "Special" Hype

The death last week of long-time Member of the House C.W. Bill Young last week means we're going to get something that this Congress has managed to put off so far: outrageous hype over a special election.

All House elections are important, and this Tampa-area one will be in one of the relatively rare competitive seats. So it will be an important election.

However, whenever it winds up being scheduled (with March 11 apparently the best guess so far) it will tell us nothing about the November 2014 elections, other than perhaps indicating what will happen in that district. It is not an early warning sign, or anything else. It's just one election.

Does it matter at all beyond the one election? Only to the extent that expectations of electoral swings can, in the right circumstances, become self-fulfilling prophesies. However, if this one does happen in March, then it's a little late to affect candidate recruitment (not all state filing deadlines are by then, but many are). And candidate recruitment is the biggest factor when it comes to "waves" created by elite-level self-fulfilling prophesies. Availability of other campaign resources can matter some, as can press coverage, probably, but those can change over the course of the year, so a single well-timed event is a lot less likely to affect them much.

Mostly, however, expect plenty of unjustified hype. Hey, reporters! Any chance you can avoid it this time?

This GOP Thing Needs a Name

I want to say something about the Second Battle of the World War II Memorial, which was the subject of much fuss over the weekend.

What's it called when you shut down the government, and then instead of spending the shutdown time arguing that your demands are just and should be accepted, you complain about parts of the government being shut down?

I don't know! I mean, one could call it hypocritical, but that doesn't seem to me at least to capture the full meaning of what's going on here.

The reason I bring it up is because I think we've reached the three-times-is-a-trend point. The other two: Republicans running mainly against the part of the ACA that they actually supported (that is the Medicare cuts); and sequestration, which they blame on Barack Obama pretty much every minute that they aren't insisting on it continuing. One might also include the Ryan/GOP position on Simpson-Bowles, which was that it was absolutely essential for the nation that Obama support Simpson-Bowles (which Ryan and most of the party opposed).

We need a name for it because it's proving quite difficult for the press to cover this sort of thing. After all, it's not easy! House Republicans really did just spend two weeks talking nonstop about the horrors of shutting down the government (okay, selected pieces of it, and mostly war memorials, but still). The press can't simply ignore that. But covering it without explaining the context doesn't work, either.

This is surely related to the David Roberts notion of "post-truth" -- the idea that politicians have discovered that spin, rather than putting policy arguments in the best possible light, can be entirely divorced from the actual policy positions it is designed to support. I suppose what I'm describing is a particular type of post-truth maneuver. It's also related to one of my continuing themes, which is that the way that the GOP-aligned partisan press works has made Republican politicians incredibly lazy, since they know that Fox News and the rest of them will fully buy into whatever talking points they come up with. 

Important caution: I'm not arguing that all of this "matters" in the sense of successfully manipulating public opinion. As we've seen in the shutdown fight, the First and Second Battles of the World War II Memorial, as big as those triumphs must have seemed for Fox News watchers, haven't prevented a complete polling disaster over the shutdown for the GOP. All I'm saying is that then the ("neutral") press covers this stuff, it needs better language for it so that readers and viewers can actually be informed about what's going on.

Oy, Fournier

Just when you think he's hit bottom, he keeps going.

First bit: Fournier believes that Republican demands (about ACA) are unreasonable, but that Barack Obama should negotiate with them. Fournier entirely ignores the argument against negotiations: that rewarding hostage-taking is a mistake, and that therefore Obama should not be willing to give anything at all on the debt limit (or, for that matter, on a short-term CR, as opposed to a full year funding bill). There are counterarguments to that position, I think, but Fournier just ignores it completely.

Second bit: Fournier believes that Obama should be negotiating with Republicans "to deftly steer an embattled and divided GOP away from Obamacare and to an issue worthy of high-stakes negotiations: The nation's long-term budget crisis." Hang on for a second about how likely that would be to work, but I really hate the hubris of this: hey, both sides, ignore what you're fighting about and solve the problem I care about! Beyond that, how long does Fournier thing this deft steering would take to actually reach a resolution? Is it even remotely realistic that it could get done in less than two weeks even if both sides were really willing to negotiate honestly and productively? Does Fournier believe that it is? Or, more to the point, is Fournier's position really that the government should stay shut down, and perhaps the debt limit breached, while all this negotiating is going on? Because he's criticizing the Democrats, who are all for negotiating over the budget...but only after the shutdown ends and the debt limit is raised or abolished.

Third bit: About the question of how likely a deficit reduction deal that Fournier likes might be...he's stark, raving, mad:

In April, I wrote that both the White House and the GOP House had incentive to strike a deal that would both raise taxes and trim entitlement spending. The story traced the outlines of such a deal, but the moment was lost. Boehner doesn't trust Obama and is worried about a revolt from his no-compromise caucus. Obama doesn't trust Boehner and is worried about a revolt from his no-compromise caucus. The House speaker reportedly raised the idea of a so-called grand bargain at a White House meeting last week, and got laughed at. That is the exact wrong response.

There is no way -- no way -- no way at all -- that House Republicans are going to "strike a deal that would bother raise taxes and trim entitlement spending." Opposing tax increases is the #1 issue that all those House Republicans have run on, rivaled only by opposing abortion as their absolute core belief. Almost all of them refused to go along with the fiscal cliff deal, which only "raised" taxes in the sense that if they had done nothing, taxes would have gone up even more -- and most of them still wouldn't vote for it on that basis. Now, without any such automatic increase hanging over their heads? Not a chance. Basically, I would guess that every single House Republican values avoiding tax increases far higher than lowering the deficit or cutting Medicare and Social Security, and therefore there is absolutely no deal you can offer them that would get them to sign up. Indeed: they haven't been shy about saying so.

Basically, Fournier's doing a ton of wishful thinking here, and paying no attention at all to what the parties actually say they want. It's bad reporting, and bad punditry. Just awful.

Why the ACA Rollout Delays?

I read a fair amount of ACA news, but I really have no idea the answer to one question: To what extent should the various mostly minor delays and glitches -- such as this one -- be attributed to:

1. Poor execution (and if so, is the the WH? Specific agencies? The states?);

2. Poor construction of the legislation to begin with (and if so, who specifically was responsible?);

3. Implementation underfunding insisted on by House Republicans;

4. Other GOP obstruction;

5. Just general "things happen" when you try to launch large, complex programs.

Or, of course, something else I'm not thinking of.

I realize that the most urgent need for reporting is on what exactly these glitches are and how they will matter, but I do hope we eventually get some good digging into what was responsible for those things didn't go right -- and, while they're at it, why some things did go smoothly.

And in the meantime, I'd love to see some informed speculation about how important each of these five (or more) factors have been. Here, for example, is (anti-ACA) Philip Klein opting for door #2; pro-ACA Jonathan Cohn, however, seems to be thinking door #5. What about it, ACA rollout reporters and close observers?

Catch of the Day

I really like Ezra Klein's analysis of the Cruz, Paul, Sanders, and Wendy Davis filibusters/extended speeches, trying to answer the question: why don't more Senators pull this stunt, since it seemed to work so well for the four of them? Klein has three answers: doing it is difficult and carries risks (of saying something foolish); it's usually unnecessary in purely legislative terms, at least in the current Senate; and it can be annoying and counterproductive.

All correct under current Senate rules and procedures.

It's not surprising, then, that the three Senators who have done it recently share quite a bit in common. They're all ideological outliers; Paul and Cruz probably couldn't do much legislatively even if they tried, and Sanders isn't quite in the mainstream of Senate Democrats, although by nature he seems far more interested in going along to get along than Paul and Cruz do.

At least Cruz and Sanders are also good talkers, politicians who definitely have the ability to make it up as they go along (I know less about Paul, and even less about Davis). Not that it's strictly necessary; at least if rules allow it, as they do in the Senate, extended speeches can consist entirely of reading written material, and as all of these cases proved the world will provide plenty of material for any filibustering politician to read once he or she gets a sufficient amount of attention. I'd add to this that arrogance is probably a plus: not just that they have the ability to talk off the cuff at length, but that they believe that they can do so and that they can change opinion with their efforts.

Moreover, it's no surprise that at least two of the examples were seeking higher office (I don't actually know whether Davis was already intending to do so, but I wouldn't be surprised).

What all this suggests is not only, as Klein says, are there disincentives for these long speeches, but they most likely work together to severely limit the number of Senators who are interested in it. Still, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are more of these in the future. Probably right up to the point where one of them implodes.

Also: nice catch!