Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Sheila E., 53.

And a bit of the good stuff:

1. Matt Yglesias David Weigel looks back at twenty years of Peterson deficit hype.

2. Suzy Khimm profiles Barack Obama's Congressional liaison, Rob Nabors. Nice story, and a typical career path for White House staff in the era of the partisan presidency; Nabors had previously worked for Bill Clinton's OMB and Dave Obey's Appropriations Committee, but not for Obama before his presidency.

3. And a good look at Hillary Clinton's polling numbers over the years from Nate Silver.

December 11, 1972

A fascinating conversation in the Oval Office, with the president, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman. It begins with clear evidence that Nixon knew all about the hush money; he's asking about the money found in Dorothy Hunt's bag after the plane crash in which she died:

Why Republicans Need Change

Jamelle Bouie argues today that Republicans may well win the presidency without actually changing much or offering new ideas.

I think that's broadly correct: the out-party just doesn't matter all that much. I'd put two caveats on it. One is that the GOP crazy has caused problems in their efforts to find an appealing general election candidate. It doesn't matter a lot, but it matters some, and they'll probably have to find some way around it or suffer an electoral penalty (which, to be sure, would be on the margins and probably wouldn't make much of a difference). The other is that actively annoying large swing constituencies is also something that can hurt them and may have hurt them this year. You would think it would be fairly easy to cut that out (avoid rhetoric that offends Latinos! Don't call women sluts if they advocate for policies you don't like!), but a good deal of this is structural, and thus harder to end than one might think. That is, if very visible Republicans have (financial) incentives to do that sort of thing, it may be difficult for electorally-oriented Republicans to do much about it.

Again, however, we're talking somewhere below five percentage points total from all that, presumably, and probably a lot less. It's unlikely to swing the election. And both of these are the sorts of things that may well be less evident after eight years out of the White House -- not that the causes will be cured, but that everyone will be willing to play nice for the duration of the campaign.

What I would say about it, however, is that the dysfunction in the current GOP makes successful governing if they do win extremely difficult. I think we've seen that for some time, and I think it was part of why George W. Bush was such a poor president; there really are major governing penalties for finding it hard to accept reality.

Put it this way: it seems that Republicans outside of the recent campaign certainly deluded themselves about the polling, and Republicans inside the campaign may well have been guilty of it too. I've argued that it didn't really hurt them, however; mostly it just meant that the eventual results took them by surprise. However, if you try to govern that way -- say, if you actually believe phony revenue estimates, or actually believe that people in some country are eager for you to invade them when in fact they are not -- then massive policy disasters are likely.

As I've said many times, this doesn't really fit on a conservative/liberal or moderate/extreme framework all that well. What's important is being able to get key clues about whether policies will work or not, clues that for a normal, healthy party are produced by the normal political system. To the extent that the current GOP is so dysfunctional that its politicians are likely to ignore those clues, or will structure their administrations so that they won't be able to hear them, the chances for catastrophic policy failure go way, way, up.

Don't Worry About the PA Plan

If you want to know why the Pennsylvania plan of rigging the Electoral College by having Republican majorities in the Keystone State change the way that electoral votes are allocated there is a bad idea in general, see Josh Putnam's excellent post on the topic. You remember -- this is the plan to neutralize the state in presidential elections by switching from winner-take-all apportionment of electoral votes to either a district plan or, now, splitting them by vote share. He's pretty mild on it, overall, concentrating on why the allocation is a poor one generally; he doesn't really go into why it's highly problematic for a party to constantly mess with the rules in such an ad hoc way in order to get the advantage.

But mostly, it's just not very likely to be a problem. The main thing here is that very few states which are reliably Democratic in presidential elections are going to have unified Republican government at the state level (and vice versa). Well, back up...first of all, the problem only arises in those states big enough so that how they split their votes will matter. Then after that, you need a state that's safely Democratic in presidential elections. If it isn't safe, then you run the risk of costing your own party!

And that's not all. After all, what matters here isn't how safe the state really is in presidential elections; it's what the incumbent Republican governor and legislature think. So for them to believe that neutralizing the state is good for a future Republican presidential candidate, they have to believe that their own elections were basically flukes. True, there are some who could acknowledge that, but I'd say it's more likely that they'll take their victories -- and remember, we're talking about unified control of state government, so it's a pretty wide win -- as signs that the state is trending to the GOP.

Everything to this point are reasons why there are only rare cases in which a state is going to find it in the national party's interest to pass this kind of plan.

The next step is that what's in the national party's (perceived) interest is unlikely to be in the interest of the state or the state party or the individual politicians. That's because each of them (the state, the state party, and the individual politicians) all have an interest in keeping their state as a major presidential battleground. The reason is the same in each case: resources flowing into the state are good, and national resources follow electoral incentives. It's possible that state politicians will nevertheless act out of national party interest, but it's not obvious they would do so at all.

And the last part? Generally, something like this doesn't just have to be favored by Republican politicians; it has to be a fairly high priority, or it won't get action. It's certainly something that will be perceived by everyone as a flat-out partisan move, and presumably Republicans who have won office in a Democratic-leaning state -- who, per above, believe that it's a Democratic-leaning state so they won't get too many chances -- won't want to pass too many flat-out partisan measures, and will have several items more important to them than a electoral college scheme that may never make any difference anyway.

Put it all together, and you're just not very likely to have this ever happen (and it's even less likely it would happen in more than one state, or stick around for long in that state). So: terrible idea, but not one to worry too much about.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Teri Garr, 65. Here's one for you: how much better are Terri Garr, Cloris Leachman, and Madeline Kahn than Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, and Marty Feldman? I'm talking overall talent, not just that one movie. And I like Boyle a lot, and I like Feldman for what he was...but that's a pretty severe imbalance, no? Hey -- I knew she was in Elvis movies, but I didn't realize that she was a dancer in The T.A.M.I. Show, too.

Lots of good stuff today:

1. Spencer Ackerman on Zero Dark Thirty and torture: he argues that the movie does not make a (false) case for the efficacy of torture.

2. AWGOC, from Stan Collender.

3. While Suzy Khimm reads different tea leaves and sees a fiscal cliff deal coming. 

4. Apparently you're going to be hearing soon that 73% of new jobs are government jobs, so you might want to read from Alex Seitz-Wald that it's (suprise!) a myth. Also in that vein; the CRA myth (the CRA caused the crash in 2008) is apparently back; Noah Smith explains why it's wrong.

5. I was hitting on the GOP for not having policy ideas...David Frum argues that Republicans do have solid ideas on how to raise revenues. Eh. Putting aside the general question he raises of which is the best policy, I see absolutely no sign that actual Republicans in Congress would vote for the things he recommends here.

6. And Dave Cameron on uncertainty, prospects, and established major league veterans.

Politicians, Change, and the GOP

How do parties change?

Over the weekend, my Salon column was about the GOP candidate rollouts last week, and how unimpressive they were on policy. I mean, not that they promoted foolish policies, but that they mostly don't really do policy at all. Which follows on the Romney campaign, which also gave up early on policy.  I contrast it with George W. Bush, who actually did campaign on public policy ideas. It's really worse than that; the current GOP not only isn't very good at devising public policy solutions, but has mostly given up on recognizing problems. Yes, they did figure out that unemployment has been a significant problem over the last few years (John Boehner's frequent refrain about "where are the jobs?" is quite appropriate for an out-party leader during a time of high unemployment), but even there they seem to forget about employment for months at a time, and of course their proposals to deal with it are identical to their policy response to pretty much everything since 1978 or so.

Where I see last week's efforts by Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Bobby Jindal as examples of a general GOP problem, Jonathan Chait has an item about Rubio today which talks about the Florida Senator as particularly skilled at figuring out which way the GOP is going and jumping in front of the parade.

It seems to me that one big question here is whether there really is any room for a presidential candidate to lead in a somewhat different direction. I don't know that there is! But presumably there is a fairly large Republican constituency which supports conservative policies but isn't very pleased with the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News version of the policy.

A candidate ready to appeal to that constituency would probably need to be as pure as possible on policy and past history going in...as I've said many times, what's wrong with the Republican Party isn't that they are in a simple sense just too conservative.

But I suspect that there is room for a political entrepreneur who could find a space involving orthodox ideology, policy innovation, and a pointed rejection of some part of the uglier or more nihilistic portions of the conservative marketplace. I suspect there are quite a few Republican party actors who would prefer a party less subservient to whatever turns out to sell to the rubes who buy Glenn Beck's latest products, and plenty of primary voters at least potentially willing to follow them.

Or at least, so I suspect. The problem with the last two rounds of GOP candidates have been that they've struggled to meet the standards of policy orthodoxy, and so they were poorly positioned to challenge the rest of it. And I don't think that was just bad luck; part of the problem is that policy orthodoxy shifts all the time, thus making it hard for politicians to keep up (see, for example, the way that shifts on climate made lots of politicians who took positions in the last decade scramble around to prove their orthodoxy in 2012. Not to mention health care reform). Indeed: that instability is one of the reasons that I suspect a lot of party actors are ready for some pushback.

Or maybe not; perhaps anyone who tries to take on the crazy would be slapped back down. It should make for an interesting couple of election cycles.

At any rate -- entrepreneurial candidates who can find ways to rearrange party coalitions like that should be one of the key ways that parties can change. Not the only way; it presumably could come from shifts in the size or importance or allegiance of party-aligned groups, or from activists putting issues on the party agenda. But surely one way. And perhaps the most likely path for the GOP out of their current problems.

Catch of the Day

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

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

Which is true.

Except it does depend on how one looks at it.

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

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

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

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

At any rate: nice catch!