How To Turn Their Heads and not Fall Between Two Horses

Kevin Drum suggests that Senate Democrats bring up the ACA repeal bill in order to vote it down. And:

But wait! With Republicans in control of the House, it's not like the Senate can really get much done anyway. So what's the harm in wasting a bit of time and making this a knock-down-drag-out fight? After all, the House leadership got a nice, clean repeal vote by bringing up the bill under a closed rule and allowing no potentially embarrassing amendments and virtually no debate. In the Senate, by contrast, Democrats control things, and they can bring up all the amendments they want. So maybe they should play along, hold hearings, and force Republicans to vote on, say, an amendment to the repeal bill that would keep the preexisting condition ban in place. And another one that would keep the donut hole fix in place. Etc. etc.

I can see the logic in bringing it up in order to vote it down. Gets it out of the way, shuts up GOP complaints about stonewalling, and it's not as if it increases risk for any Democrat. Well, perhaps Joe Manchin, who might will just vote to repeal -- everyone else has already voted to pass it or won't mind voting for it now.

But the amendment strategy sounds like trouble to me. What if all the "exempt the popular stuff" amendments pass? Then what do Democrats do on final passage? Meanwhile, Republicans would be buying themselves cover; unless the amendments are very carefully designed, they might well be able to get on record as favoring repeal for the bill as a whole (more or less the popular position, although see Greg Sargent's reporting on the polling) while voting to retain all the individually popular items.

Besides, I think Ezra Klein is correct:

As a general point, I think "making people take semi-embarrassing votes" is vastly overrated in American politics. Can anyone think of a campaign that even partly turned on one of these gambits?

And, at any rate, the single up-or-down vote can already be spun out as a vote to oppose anything in the ACA; factcheckers aren't going to complain if a candidate in 2012 accuses a Senator of opposing a ban on lifetime caps even if there's no specific amendment about it.

Kent Conrad

I liked what Ezra Klein said about Kent Conrad earlier today. I've followed his career quite a bit, too, since I worked for another North Dakota Senator when Conrad was newly elected, and because I'm a big fan of Richard Fenno's When Incumbency Fails, which tells the story of Conrad's predecessor, Mark Andrews.

My comment? If you were to ask me for the list of United States Senators who really cared about budget deficits, my list would probably begin and end with Kent Conrad. Sure, he's not an absolutist about it, and sure, there are other Senators who probably have the deficit reasonably high on the list of priorities, but Conrad, from what I can see, is the only one who consistently seems to place the budget deficit front and center. Now, that's not exactly my cup of tea, so on policy grounds he's never been one of my favorites, but if you care about the budget deficit, you really should be a Kent Conrad fan.

The Lieberman Gambit

Holy Joe's retirement closes the book, more or less, on a great question: was the decision by liberals to go all in on the primary challenge in 2006 a good idea?

I called it "a reasonable gamble by liberals gone bad" a while ago, but I think I was wrong. 

Going back to the gamble...in 2006, Joe Lieberman was a very annoying Senator for many liberals, but he was not the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. He was, however, probably the Democratic Senator farthest to the right compared to his state, which made him a logical primary target, even if he wasn't so personally annoying. Alas for liberals, the primary wound up with probably the worst possible result. Had Lieberman won, he probably would have shrugged it off and continued on with his career; if he had been clobbered by Ned Lamont, he probably would have quit at that point. Instead, with Lamont edging him by 10,000 votes and everything else falling perfectly into place, Lieberman wound up returning to Washington as a party-defying independent.

As it worked out, however, I can't recall a single instance in which Joe Lieberman was the deciding vote against the Democrats. He was with Barack Obama on the stimulus, on health care, and on Dodd-Frank. He was a leader in the successful repeal of DADT, and the unsuccessful climate/energy bill. His voting record really didn't even shift very much. Against that is that he probably became even more annoying to liberals (here, I'll link again to Gail Collins's appreciation). And then there's whatever electoral value derived from his party-defying endorsement of John McCain in 2008, which I'd say was practically zero (and that's assuming he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been challenged in 2006; if he would have done it anyway, and as a Democrat in good standing, the endorsement would have carried a bit more weight, for what it's worth). 

And, now, his retirement. It seems to me very, very likely that had Lieberman won renomination unchallenged in 2006, he would now be running for another term and heading for renomination, at least. If 2012 turns out to be a fair-to-good year for Democrats, then as it is Connecticut will probably send a liberal Democrat to Congress, instead of returning Holy Joe for another term as a moderate. 

Regular readers know that I'm usually pretty quick to point out the downside to ideological primary challenges. But I think liberals can be pretty happy with themselves on this one; even though things didn't work out how they wanted, they probably did wind up beating Joe Lieberman six years down the road, and with very little cost in the interim.  

Context and Interpreting Polls

I hate to be a scold, but...

Dave Weigel noticed yesterday that the number of Americans who think that Barack Obama is helping or will help race relations has fallen dramatically since the first time the Washington Post asked about it (WaPo polling here). Adam Serwer tried to interpret and explain the change in terms of conservative rhetoric surrounding race.

That's fine and all, and I'm a fan of both Weigel and Serwer, but when you see this kind of result, the first question to ask is what else is going on in the polling.  The drop from the first poll, taken during the transition, to the current poll is 23 points. The first question I'd ask is: what was his overall drop in polling? Unfortunately, I can't find an approval number that corresponds with the January 4, 2009 date for the "before" race number, but the two polls surrounding early January asking about the transition recorded 76% and 80% approval numbers. The "after" race number is from a poll which has Obama at 54% overall approval. In other words, 23 point drop on the race question corresponds with an approximately 25 point drop in overall approval.

It is true that Obama is doing a bit worse on the race question than he was in January 2010, despite a flat overall approval trend. So there might be something here. And of course it is possible that at least some of the causation runs the other way, with Americans thinking less of Obama overall because they first decided he was failing to achieve racial harmony. But generally, it's going to be the overall approval rating that drives approval on subquestions, and for all we know the small rally from last January could just be noise.

Polling is a very valuable tool, but always, always ask yourself first whether there are any major factors that call into question the face value of polling numbers.

Catch of the Day

Digby was paying attention to the House debate on health care yesterday, and noted that Republican Phil Gingrey of Georgia mocked HHS statistics about pre-existing conditions by saying that "They would all have to have hang nails and fever blisters to have pre-existing conditions and if you believe those statistics, I’ve got a beach to sell you in Pennsylvania." Digby points out that Gingrey misses the entire point: one of the key problems is exactly that insurance companies were free to, and in fact did, reject people because of seemingly trivial maladies:

These pampered princes with their federal cadillac plan have absolutely no idea what it's like to try to deal with the private health insurance market. I was denied health insurance from three different companies because I had been treated for gingivitis in the previous five years. I kid you not. It took me appealing all the way to the top, with proof that the condition had been reversed, before a fourth would take me.

Not a hangnail or a fever blister, but close. They will use any excuse to exclude you, particularly if you are over a certain age. Gingrey is a privileged ass.

Yup. I'll disagree that the problem is because Members of Congress have solid health insurance; in my view, the problem is more one of a combination of ideological and partisan blinders. Either way -- nice catch.

JFK 50 and Post-Presidential Reputation

Robert Dallek has a nice article today in Salon about the puzzling post-presidential reputation of John F. Kennedy, who shows no sign of slipping in the public's esteem, even as fewer and fewer are around who actually remember him or voted for him.

Dallek also notes that Ronald Reagan does well in post-presidential polling, and attributes it to mainly to style, I think; he calls Kennedy and Reagan "master psychologists of the middle classes."

Perhaps. As usual, I lean towards institutional explanations, and to our old friend the one-sided information flow. As I've said before, four postwar presidents have had serious, sustained efforts to enhance their reputations. Two, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, were essentially single-person efforts. The other two, Kennedy and Reagan, benefited from publicity campaigns on their behalf. That model seems to be the successful one, especially long-term. The result of that kind of campaign is one-sided information flow, because there's not much of any reason for anyone to waste their time agitating against an ex-president.

(Similarly it became logical for lots of reasons for New Dealers, including New Deal historians, to praise Woodrow Wilson, which in my view is the reason for Wilson's overrated reputation).

As far as I can tell, which presidents get this treatment is almost random. Kennedy happened to have a large, wealthy family and many talented staff and supporters interested in that sort of thing; that does sort well with what I think was a very personal presidency, but there are other personal presidencies that didn't generate much after the White House. Reagan had a conservative movement eager for a symbolic leader. Carter and Nixon just happened to care about their reputations, apparently, a lot more than, say, Gerald Ford or either George Bush seemed to.

I'm not sure where to place Bill Clinton. He's certainly tried to be visible doing good works, like Carter, but (and perhaps this is just my personal sense of things) Clinton seems a whole lot less self-aggrandizing than does Carter. Sure, WJC is campaigning for himself and his party; no question but that he's a born politician, and he'll never really turn that off. But it just doesn't strike me as similar to Carter's never-ending quest for sainthood. Clinton is also, almost certainly, the most partisan ex-president in modern times. (Ever? Could be). And then you have the unique so far situation of an ex-president whose wife has been a national-level politician; I don't know if that should be interpreted as part of Bill Clinton's publicity campaign, or as something that distracts from any efforts he might want to make to enhance his reputation.

Dogs, Not Barking

1. OK, so we've now had an ACA repeal vote in the House. But it's worth noting that as far as I'm aware, John Boehner has not yet scheduled a vote on repealing the Lilly Ledbetter law. Or DADT repeal, Tim Pawlenty notwithstanding. Or Dodd-Frank. Or food safety. Or the child nutrition law. Most of what the 111th Congress did is going to be in place (with or without modifications) for a long time.

2. No party switchers in Congress after the November landslide.

3. Joe the Plumber.

4. Big news on the Fairness Doctrine front! Thanks to a comment by Jim Clyburn, we can now be absolutely sure the the FD is going to be re-imposed any day now, thus forcing me to retire it from this continuing item. Ed Kilgore has more.