Three comments on the excellent Michael Cooper NYT story about the Democrats' stealth tax cut within the stimulus bill.
First, Cooper doesn't mention the most likely reason people think taxes went up: they've been told that Barack Obama and the Democrats are raising taxes, nonstop, by GOP pols and conservative talk show hosts. Anyone listening to Rush and watching Fox News -- and having no other source of news - would naturally believe that Obama and the Democrats had done nothing but raise taxes from day one. (To his credit, Cooper does mention the other reason, which is that state taxes have in many cases gone up.
Second, it's worth mentioning against that (as reported by Plain Blog brother and ace journalist David S. Bernstein) the National Taxpayers Union scored the stimulus as a major negative -- that is, when Democrats cut taxes, the NTU counted it as a bad vote. No, I don't think that the NTU action had anything to do with perceptions in the nation at large, but I still think it's a striking fact that didn't get as much play as it deserved.
Third: this story is a good example of why media bias is so difficult to measure. On the one hand, here's the (liberal?) New York Times running a story unprompted by events, and just two weeks before Election Day, highlighting a policy which presumably would help Democrats if people knew about it. On the other hand, the fact that such a story could be written -- the fact that most people think Obama has raised taxes when in fact the opposite is true -- is strong evidence against the idea that Americans are influenced by a liberal media.
Follow-up suggestion for Michael Cooper: how about a story on the Medicare donut hole checks sent as part of the ACA? How many recipients had any idea what they were?
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Iron Law of Politics (Beanbag, This Ain't Edition)
Ezra Klein had what I think is a great point yesterday.
The other part of this is that conservative activists believe the exact opposite -- they believe that Republican pols are a bunch of wimpy, half-hearted idealists who allow ruthless liberal Democrats, who play this game for keeps, to trample all over them. Indeed, this follows the Iron Law of Politics that everyone believes that the other side is better at the mechanics of politics: the other side is always more ruthless in their exploitation of the rules and willingness to ignore ethical niceties, more tactically adept, better at extracting money from their base, and (depending on who is complaining) either better at ignoring the policy demands of their crazy ideological base in order to win the center or better at addressing the policy demands of the base, while our side uses and then ignores the policy demands of the base.
In a second item, Klein notes as evidence of successful GOP hardball tactics the Swift Boaters from 2004; while he doesn't include it, many Democrats believe that a difference in willingness to fight hard was responsible for the outcome of the 2000 recount. But Republicans have their own list of grievances, including the last-minute revelation of George W. Bush's driving record in 2000 and the stuff about his military service in 2004.
While I'm not sure that I would say that both parties are in all cases equally ruthless, or equally unethical, I would say with some confidence that most of this is just the Iron Law in action, nothing more. That's not to say that the parties have followed identical strategies; Republicans, as far as I can see much more than Democrats, have exploited situations in which ignoring unwritten rules can help them, such as the decision to redistrict in Texas once the GOP took control, rather than waiting for the next census. In opposition in Congress, Republicans in 1993 and 2009 followed rejectionist strategies, while Democrats in 2001-2006 for the most part did not. But as far as I can tell, those are choices (right or wrong) of optimal strategy, not a question of guts vs. fecklessness. And I agree: to the extent that the parties have followed different strategies, it's not at all clear that Republicans have benefited.
Then there's this question of "hardball." This is broader than the Rand/Conway race, but what, exactly, is the evidence for the widespread Democratic belief that Republicans are ruthlessly effective tacticians while they are wilting violets? [...]
A lot of liberals I know believe that conservatives are coldblooded in a way they simply aren't, but should be. And so on some level, they're really glad to see Democrats bringing a howitzer to a gun fight. But I just don't see the evidence that this stuff is working out for Republicans. What accomplishments do they have to show for it? What enduring majorities? Where's the payoff for quieting your conscience? Putting aside the morality of "these vicious, horrible people will do anything to win, and therefore so too should we," where's the evidence that it works?
The other part of this is that conservative activists believe the exact opposite -- they believe that Republican pols are a bunch of wimpy, half-hearted idealists who allow ruthless liberal Democrats, who play this game for keeps, to trample all over them. Indeed, this follows the Iron Law of Politics that everyone believes that the other side is better at the mechanics of politics: the other side is always more ruthless in their exploitation of the rules and willingness to ignore ethical niceties, more tactically adept, better at extracting money from their base, and (depending on who is complaining) either better at ignoring the policy demands of their crazy ideological base in order to win the center or better at addressing the policy demands of the base, while our side uses and then ignores the policy demands of the base.
In a second item, Klein notes as evidence of successful GOP hardball tactics the Swift Boaters from 2004; while he doesn't include it, many Democrats believe that a difference in willingness to fight hard was responsible for the outcome of the 2000 recount. But Republicans have their own list of grievances, including the last-minute revelation of George W. Bush's driving record in 2000 and the stuff about his military service in 2004.
While I'm not sure that I would say that both parties are in all cases equally ruthless, or equally unethical, I would say with some confidence that most of this is just the Iron Law in action, nothing more. That's not to say that the parties have followed identical strategies; Republicans, as far as I can see much more than Democrats, have exploited situations in which ignoring unwritten rules can help them, such as the decision to redistrict in Texas once the GOP took control, rather than waiting for the next census. In opposition in Congress, Republicans in 1993 and 2009 followed rejectionist strategies, while Democrats in 2001-2006 for the most part did not. But as far as I can tell, those are choices (right or wrong) of optimal strategy, not a question of guts vs. fecklessness. And I agree: to the extent that the parties have followed different strategies, it's not at all clear that Republicans have benefited.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Are You Receiving Me?
Speaking of the news that the Awakening in Iraq may not end the way that it started (see this NYT article, a good Matt Yglesias post, and my remarks about politicians and policy)...
One of the most interesting things about Iraq, to me, is how it demonstrates how the relationship between elections and public policy really work. I'm thinking about the 2006 election cycle. Of course, liberals were terribly disappointed in the immediate aftermath of those elections: Democrats in Congress, despite moving into the majority, were not only unable to end the war in Iraq, but found no way to prevent the surge. In other words, the immediate effects of the 2006 election appeared to be the exact opposite of what people wanted. Could that possibly be justified in a democracy?
Well, yes and no. Putting aside for a moment the question of justification, we can look a bit more at what messages were actually sent and received. As usual, it's difficult to tell exactly what the electorate was "saying" in the 2006 elections. We can trace some things...the Iraq war was unpopular, and it hurt Bush's approval ratings and, eventually, GOP candidates. It's a lot harder, however, to conclude that the electorate was "saying" anything specific about Iraq policy. No doubt that most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq. But of course most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq in 2004, too.
Beyond that, however, even when we have good survey or polling data, it's hard -- in my view, impossible -- to draw specific conclusions about exactly what the electorate is saying. Many voters in 2006 weren't even thinking of Iraq. They may have been concerned about various Congressional scandals having nothing to do with policy, or they may have just been reacting to a particularly good set of Democratic candidates (who were running and were well-funded, to be sure, because George W. Bush had become unpopular, which was in large part because of Iraq). And then we know that most voters know very little about public policy. That makes it hard, too; even good survey data are going to be dependent on what voters know about policy, and it's very possible that voters may have vague preferences (Iraq is going badly! Make it better!) that lead them to one set of answers to one set of polling questions, but other (contradictory) answers to other questions.
That's not because voters are stupid -- it's just that most voters don't take the time to carefully study all the various policy options available on all the issues of the day, and so they'll often respond to polls with policies or positions that are internally inconsistent. One of the reasonable conclusions to draw from this is that detailed policy mandates from elections are fictions.
And yet...from the perspective of four years on, it seems pretty clear to me that the 2006 election has, in fact, ended (or, better, will soon end) American involvement in Iraq.
Two parts to this. On the Hill, Democrats who were responsive to antiwar voters pushed to end the war, while the remaining Republicans (seeing the results of the 2006 elections) probably were not eager to stand up for it. That wasn't enough to have a direct effect, at least with a Republican in the White House determined to oppose those Democrats, but it did change the equation quite a bit. At the White House, it certainly seems to me (and I've only skimmed the insider accounts that are out so far, let alone those still to come) that the elections were taken as an immediate signal to Do Something!: thus dumping Donald Rumsfeld, thus the surge, and thus the eventual agreement to leave, an agreement that Barack Obama has so far carried out.
Do Something! may not seem to be much, but in fact we can go back to Alexander Hamilton and think about "energy in the executive" compared to drift. What this means, to me, is very simple: a president who focuses on a problem is apt to solve it. That goes for smart presidents and foolish ones, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. The key variable isn't whether they have good plans; the key variable is whether they aggressively attack the problem or not.
See, no matter who the president might be, you're going to get a lot of drift, because there's just so much that the government does or could do, and because it really does take presidential involvement to make sure that presidential policies are enacted. A good president can be judicious about what to delegate and when to get personally involved, and a president with a strong reputation for getting his way and a good White House staff may be able get results with relatively less of a personal commitment. Indeed, that's one of the best ways, in my view, to judge presidents: how much "energy in the executive" (properly understood) did they create. To me, of all the criticisms of George W. Bush that are reasonable, the most devastating is that he put wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on autopilot for years.
Perhaps then whatever the merits or lack of merits of the surge, it would at least be better than drift. And that's the way to see the 2006 election from the point of view of the White House; the instruction heard from the American people to Do Something! about Iraq ended drift. And, once the war was actively managed, and with few Republicans up for election (including presidential candidates) in 2008 eager to make Iraq a central issue in the campaign -- but with the president reluctant to accept "defeat" on his watch -- a strategy involving a show of force, a declaration of victory, and then a retreat begun before the 2008 election (in order to take it off the table) but scheduled for completion after the election (so the next crowd could be blamed if it went wrong) made a lot of sense.
Is that "democratic"?
I think we can say is that it was democracy as it actually is, whatever we might want democracy to be. Yes, it's democracy in a Madisonian system of separated institutions, sharing powers; in a parliamentary system, it's possible that elections in 2006 would have chucked the incumbent party and installed the antiwar Democrats. On the other hand, changing parties (at least in the White House) in 1968 didn't end Vietnam for years...it's never going to be easy for the current government to take ownership of losing a war, whether they were responsible for beginning it or not. And some of the things discussed here -- the difficultly of identifying a signal out of election returns -- are just as true in parliamentary elections.
I talked last week about the strong incentive for politicians who get elected to keep their constituents happy, and the 2006/Iraq example, to me, speaks to just how complex that can be. It's strikes me as better than the alternatives, but anyone who tells you that democracy is simply a question of doing what the people want doesn't really understand what's involved.
One of the most interesting things about Iraq, to me, is how it demonstrates how the relationship between elections and public policy really work. I'm thinking about the 2006 election cycle. Of course, liberals were terribly disappointed in the immediate aftermath of those elections: Democrats in Congress, despite moving into the majority, were not only unable to end the war in Iraq, but found no way to prevent the surge. In other words, the immediate effects of the 2006 election appeared to be the exact opposite of what people wanted. Could that possibly be justified in a democracy?
Well, yes and no. Putting aside for a moment the question of justification, we can look a bit more at what messages were actually sent and received. As usual, it's difficult to tell exactly what the electorate was "saying" in the 2006 elections. We can trace some things...the Iraq war was unpopular, and it hurt Bush's approval ratings and, eventually, GOP candidates. It's a lot harder, however, to conclude that the electorate was "saying" anything specific about Iraq policy. No doubt that most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq. But of course most liberal Democrats wanted out of Iraq in 2004, too.
Beyond that, however, even when we have good survey or polling data, it's hard -- in my view, impossible -- to draw specific conclusions about exactly what the electorate is saying. Many voters in 2006 weren't even thinking of Iraq. They may have been concerned about various Congressional scandals having nothing to do with policy, or they may have just been reacting to a particularly good set of Democratic candidates (who were running and were well-funded, to be sure, because George W. Bush had become unpopular, which was in large part because of Iraq). And then we know that most voters know very little about public policy. That makes it hard, too; even good survey data are going to be dependent on what voters know about policy, and it's very possible that voters may have vague preferences (Iraq is going badly! Make it better!) that lead them to one set of answers to one set of polling questions, but other (contradictory) answers to other questions.
That's not because voters are stupid -- it's just that most voters don't take the time to carefully study all the various policy options available on all the issues of the day, and so they'll often respond to polls with policies or positions that are internally inconsistent. One of the reasonable conclusions to draw from this is that detailed policy mandates from elections are fictions.
And yet...from the perspective of four years on, it seems pretty clear to me that the 2006 election has, in fact, ended (or, better, will soon end) American involvement in Iraq.
Two parts to this. On the Hill, Democrats who were responsive to antiwar voters pushed to end the war, while the remaining Republicans (seeing the results of the 2006 elections) probably were not eager to stand up for it. That wasn't enough to have a direct effect, at least with a Republican in the White House determined to oppose those Democrats, but it did change the equation quite a bit. At the White House, it certainly seems to me (and I've only skimmed the insider accounts that are out so far, let alone those still to come) that the elections were taken as an immediate signal to Do Something!: thus dumping Donald Rumsfeld, thus the surge, and thus the eventual agreement to leave, an agreement that Barack Obama has so far carried out.
Do Something! may not seem to be much, but in fact we can go back to Alexander Hamilton and think about "energy in the executive" compared to drift. What this means, to me, is very simple: a president who focuses on a problem is apt to solve it. That goes for smart presidents and foolish ones, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. The key variable isn't whether they have good plans; the key variable is whether they aggressively attack the problem or not.
See, no matter who the president might be, you're going to get a lot of drift, because there's just so much that the government does or could do, and because it really does take presidential involvement to make sure that presidential policies are enacted. A good president can be judicious about what to delegate and when to get personally involved, and a president with a strong reputation for getting his way and a good White House staff may be able get results with relatively less of a personal commitment. Indeed, that's one of the best ways, in my view, to judge presidents: how much "energy in the executive" (properly understood) did they create. To me, of all the criticisms of George W. Bush that are reasonable, the most devastating is that he put wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on autopilot for years.
Perhaps then whatever the merits or lack of merits of the surge, it would at least be better than drift. And that's the way to see the 2006 election from the point of view of the White House; the instruction heard from the American people to Do Something! about Iraq ended drift. And, once the war was actively managed, and with few Republicans up for election (including presidential candidates) in 2008 eager to make Iraq a central issue in the campaign -- but with the president reluctant to accept "defeat" on his watch -- a strategy involving a show of force, a declaration of victory, and then a retreat begun before the 2008 election (in order to take it off the table) but scheduled for completion after the election (so the next crowd could be blamed if it went wrong) made a lot of sense.
Is that "democratic"?
I think we can say is that it was democracy as it actually is, whatever we might want democracy to be. Yes, it's democracy in a Madisonian system of separated institutions, sharing powers; in a parliamentary system, it's possible that elections in 2006 would have chucked the incumbent party and installed the antiwar Democrats. On the other hand, changing parties (at least in the White House) in 1968 didn't end Vietnam for years...it's never going to be easy for the current government to take ownership of losing a war, whether they were responsible for beginning it or not. And some of the things discussed here -- the difficultly of identifying a signal out of election returns -- are just as true in parliamentary elections.
I talked last week about the strong incentive for politicians who get elected to keep their constituents happy, and the 2006/Iraq example, to me, speaks to just how complex that can be. It's strikes me as better than the alternatives, but anyone who tells you that democracy is simply a question of doing what the people want doesn't really understand what's involved.
War Dance
Matt Yglesias has a good reaction post to the Sunday NYT story about Awakening Councils switching sides again in Iraq. I have two points here, one about how policy looks from the point of view of the president and one about elections and democracy; I'll tackle them in separate posts. So: I agree with what Yglesias says, especially that "there’s no genius “counterinsurgency” method here ready to be successfully deployed around the world."
I might disagree, however, with his claim that "nothing in Iraq has really been solved." George W. Bush had a real problem in late 2006 -- how to get out of Iraq without accepting the blame for defeat there. In that, the surge most definitely worked; at great cost (and it's important to remember that the surge months were basically the peak period for coalition losses), the surge achieved peace enough that Bush's subsequent actions could be spun and believed as that old elusive goal, Peace With Honor. Whatever the merits of the surge for long-term stability or a US-friendly future in Iraq, I think it's hard to see how Bush could have simply declared victory and pulled out in fall 2006 without further undermining his credibility. Of course, he could have done it anyway, but presidents are reluctant to undermine their credibility with good reason, at home and abroad -- not to mention that they're reluctant to just admit defeat in wars they began. Now, I'm not saying that it was "worth" some 1500 dead American soldiers to rescue what little remained of George W. Bush's shattered credibility at that point...just that he was in a legitimately awful situation by that point, and the surge "worked" to solve that, regardless of what happens in the long run.
(Just to be clear: I'm not saying at all that critics of the surge were wrong, just that whether it "worked" depends on what it was supposed to do. If the goal of the surge was to get Americans out in the medium run without George W. Bush getting the blame for "losing" a war, then I think it worked. It's worth keeping in mind that it was always presented as a temporary surge, not an escalation, and it was eventually executed that way. But none of this means it was the "right" policy in any overall, objective way...I tend to side with Yglesias on that, but it's one of those questions that's awful hard to answer definitively. And of course it has to be said whenever this comes up that Bush created the problem for himself by starting the war in Iraq without a reasonable plan for "victory," and then not actively managing the war for years).
The point here is that part of what democracies do is empower politicians, and that means, for better or worse, that what politicians care about turns out to matter. If it's true that the only thing that was bought by the surge was making sure that Iraq was not "lost" on Bush's watch...well, a lot of people will tell you that's a horrible thing (and, yes I'm using a lot of scare quotes in this item, because so many of these concepts are contested). But it's hard to see any way around that sort of thing in a representative democracy.
I might disagree, however, with his claim that "nothing in Iraq has really been solved." George W. Bush had a real problem in late 2006 -- how to get out of Iraq without accepting the blame for defeat there. In that, the surge most definitely worked; at great cost (and it's important to remember that the surge months were basically the peak period for coalition losses), the surge achieved peace enough that Bush's subsequent actions could be spun and believed as that old elusive goal, Peace With Honor. Whatever the merits of the surge for long-term stability or a US-friendly future in Iraq, I think it's hard to see how Bush could have simply declared victory and pulled out in fall 2006 without further undermining his credibility. Of course, he could have done it anyway, but presidents are reluctant to undermine their credibility with good reason, at home and abroad -- not to mention that they're reluctant to just admit defeat in wars they began. Now, I'm not saying that it was "worth" some 1500 dead American soldiers to rescue what little remained of George W. Bush's shattered credibility at that point...just that he was in a legitimately awful situation by that point, and the surge "worked" to solve that, regardless of what happens in the long run.
(Just to be clear: I'm not saying at all that critics of the surge were wrong, just that whether it "worked" depends on what it was supposed to do. If the goal of the surge was to get Americans out in the medium run without George W. Bush getting the blame for "losing" a war, then I think it worked. It's worth keeping in mind that it was always presented as a temporary surge, not an escalation, and it was eventually executed that way. But none of this means it was the "right" policy in any overall, objective way...I tend to side with Yglesias on that, but it's one of those questions that's awful hard to answer definitively. And of course it has to be said whenever this comes up that Bush created the problem for himself by starting the war in Iraq without a reasonable plan for "victory," and then not actively managing the war for years).
The point here is that part of what democracies do is empower politicians, and that means, for better or worse, that what politicians care about turns out to matter. If it's true that the only thing that was bought by the surge was making sure that Iraq was not "lost" on Bush's watch...well, a lot of people will tell you that's a horrible thing (and, yes I'm using a lot of scare quotes in this item, because so many of these concepts are contested). But it's hard to see any way around that sort of thing in a representative democracy.
Millions (All Babbling Crossword)
Since I praised Kevin Drum's recent article on the history of wild, half-crazed conservative reactions to the election of Democratic presidents from FDR on, I was interested in Ross Douthat's column today that took Drum (and others) on. Douthat's thesis:
In one sense, Douthat is almost certainly right about some part of the liberal reaction. No one loses an election and immediately concludes: the people were right, and I was wrong. Much more likely are claims that the other side cheated (either literally, as in recent conservative claims about ACORN or, in 1996, foreign money); claims that the other side were unprincipled, ruthless, demagogues (heard quite a bit in 1992 and 2008); or claims that our side mishandled the whole thing, and if they had only listened to me and been more conservative or less conservative or run just the right ads or used this line in the debate or embraced this issue or tactically retreated on that issue then things would have been different. I'm using GOP examples of losses just to remind everyone that these are universal reactions to losses, and I've seen all of them so far as the Democrats prepare to respond to their losses in November. So fair enough. There certainly are Dems, for example, who are writing off their losses as proof that the American people are just too stupid/racist/whatever for good government, and it's fair to call them on that.
On the other hand, another thing that goes on is an honest attempt to understand what Tea Partyism is all about -- not to dismiss it, but to figure out what it is and what it isn't. Count me firmly on Drum's side of this: Tea Partyism is simply a manifestation of how large numbers of conservatives react to the fact of a liberal Democrat in the White House. That doesn't mean that they are not real people (indeed, that's true regardless of how much funding or organizational support they get from large conservative donors). It doesn't mean that their concerns are not real, or that they are not a significant political force. Explaining something doesn't mean explaining it away.
Now, Douthat wants people to believe that Tea Party activists are driven not by a Democrat in the White House, but by issue idealism around the issues of "bailouts, deficits and spending." Is that true? Well, first of all, without far more survey data than we have, I think any such interpretation gets awful close to what Henry Farrell calls "Me, the People" thinking. There are a lot of Tea Party groups, and collectively they have a lot of issue positions, and it's very tempting to select those that the pundit wants to embrace.
Indeed, Douthat conveniently leaves out taxes from that issue grouping -- recall that "Tea" Party at least sometimes has stood for "Taxed Enough Already." This suggests that "deficits" cannot be taken literally as a Tea Party concern. Indeed, it's pretty clear that if Tea Party preferences were enacted, deficits would soar, just as they did under George W. Bush. I'd also say that Tea Party candidates -- and yes, that's an even trickier group to define, but still -- are hardly shy or moderate about social issues.
Now, I disagree with Drum's response, in which he makes the case that conservatives (Tea Party or otherwise) don't care about spending. I don't think it's convincing. Yes, spending increased under Bush, but outside of defense spending, conservatives in Congress were almost certainly willing to slash spending, including spending on entitlements; a lot of conservatives opposed Medicare expansion, which is why it was such a difficult vote in the first place. (Note that even there it wasn't deficits that bothered reluctant or rebellious conservatives; if I recall correctly, no one on the right proposed passing expanded benefits but only if they were paid for somehow). I especially dislike arguments in the form of "it didn't pass, so therefore they must not really have wanted it." I think liberal Democrats in 2009-2010 genuinely wanted a climate/energy bill, and conservative Republicans genuinely wanted a Social Security bill. Not having the votes, Tom DeLay and friends let the thing die rather than force hard choices on their conference, but that's not about conservative opposition. And at any rate, what DeLay and Bush said in 2005-2006 isn't really evidence of what Tea Partiers think today.
So: (1) we don't know what Tea Partiers really want because there are a whole lot of them and we don't have good information about it; (2) to understand why this particular phenomenon has flared up does not imply it should be dismissed; and, (3) I'm willing to accept Tea Partiers at their word for what issues they care about, but I'm not going to buy that anyone is for deficit reduction if their proposals would increase the deficit.
(Updated with several typos and awkward wordings fixed -- thanks to commenters for catching those)
The Democrats are weeks away from a midterm thumping that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the liberal mind is desperate for a narrative, a storyline, something to ease the pain of losing to a ragtag band of right-wing populists. Something that explains the Tea Parties — and then explains them away.Well, there are a couple of ways to think about this.
In one sense, Douthat is almost certainly right about some part of the liberal reaction. No one loses an election and immediately concludes: the people were right, and I was wrong. Much more likely are claims that the other side cheated (either literally, as in recent conservative claims about ACORN or, in 1996, foreign money); claims that the other side were unprincipled, ruthless, demagogues (heard quite a bit in 1992 and 2008); or claims that our side mishandled the whole thing, and if they had only listened to me and been more conservative or less conservative or run just the right ads or used this line in the debate or embraced this issue or tactically retreated on that issue then things would have been different. I'm using GOP examples of losses just to remind everyone that these are universal reactions to losses, and I've seen all of them so far as the Democrats prepare to respond to their losses in November. So fair enough. There certainly are Dems, for example, who are writing off their losses as proof that the American people are just too stupid/racist/whatever for good government, and it's fair to call them on that.
On the other hand, another thing that goes on is an honest attempt to understand what Tea Partyism is all about -- not to dismiss it, but to figure out what it is and what it isn't. Count me firmly on Drum's side of this: Tea Partyism is simply a manifestation of how large numbers of conservatives react to the fact of a liberal Democrat in the White House. That doesn't mean that they are not real people (indeed, that's true regardless of how much funding or organizational support they get from large conservative donors). It doesn't mean that their concerns are not real, or that they are not a significant political force. Explaining something doesn't mean explaining it away.
Now, Douthat wants people to believe that Tea Party activists are driven not by a Democrat in the White House, but by issue idealism around the issues of "bailouts, deficits and spending." Is that true? Well, first of all, without far more survey data than we have, I think any such interpretation gets awful close to what Henry Farrell calls "Me, the People" thinking. There are a lot of Tea Party groups, and collectively they have a lot of issue positions, and it's very tempting to select those that the pundit wants to embrace.
Indeed, Douthat conveniently leaves out taxes from that issue grouping -- recall that "Tea" Party at least sometimes has stood for "Taxed Enough Already." This suggests that "deficits" cannot be taken literally as a Tea Party concern. Indeed, it's pretty clear that if Tea Party preferences were enacted, deficits would soar, just as they did under George W. Bush. I'd also say that Tea Party candidates -- and yes, that's an even trickier group to define, but still -- are hardly shy or moderate about social issues.
Now, I disagree with Drum's response, in which he makes the case that conservatives (Tea Party or otherwise) don't care about spending. I don't think it's convincing. Yes, spending increased under Bush, but outside of defense spending, conservatives in Congress were almost certainly willing to slash spending, including spending on entitlements; a lot of conservatives opposed Medicare expansion, which is why it was such a difficult vote in the first place. (Note that even there it wasn't deficits that bothered reluctant or rebellious conservatives; if I recall correctly, no one on the right proposed passing expanded benefits but only if they were paid for somehow). I especially dislike arguments in the form of "it didn't pass, so therefore they must not really have wanted it." I think liberal Democrats in 2009-2010 genuinely wanted a climate/energy bill, and conservative Republicans genuinely wanted a Social Security bill. Not having the votes, Tom DeLay and friends let the thing die rather than force hard choices on their conference, but that's not about conservative opposition. And at any rate, what DeLay and Bush said in 2005-2006 isn't really evidence of what Tea Partiers think today.
So: (1) we don't know what Tea Partiers really want because there are a whole lot of them and we don't have good information about it; (2) to understand why this particular phenomenon has flared up does not imply it should be dismissed; and, (3) I'm willing to accept Tea Partiers at their word for what issues they care about, but I'm not going to buy that anyone is for deficit reduction if their proposals would increase the deficit.
(Updated with several typos and awkward wordings fixed -- thanks to commenters for catching those)
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Sunday Question for Liberals
How scared are you about the possibility that the Supreme Court will (1) knock out ACA, and (2) return to pre-New Deal interpretations of the powers of the federal government?
And, the big question: should that happen, what kinds of political consequences would you expect?
And, the big question: should that happen, what kinds of political consequences would you expect?
Sunday Question for Conservatives
So I was watching Sharron Angle debate the other night, and I realized: she either believes, or is attempting to make people believe, that what the ACA does is replace all the existing types of health care insurance with a single thing called "Obamacare" -- that in 2014, we'll all have government health insurance. Moreover, she seems to believe that right now we all have lots of choices about health insurance, but that after "Obamacare" is implemented no one will have any choices at all.
My question for conservatives is: is that pretty much what you think was in the ACA? Do you think that Angle and other GOP pols think that -- or do you think they're just using a shorthand for regulated health care? I'm curious as to whether health care reform opponents have a minimal understanding of what the legislation does. Of course, there are very legitimate disputes about how it will work out in practice, as well as legitimate disputes about whether it would be a good thing even if it works the way Democrats say that it will work, but I'm more curious about whether Angle and others have just a basic, minimal sense of what's in the law.
My question for conservatives is: is that pretty much what you think was in the ACA? Do you think that Angle and other GOP pols think that -- or do you think they're just using a shorthand for regulated health care? I'm curious as to whether health care reform opponents have a minimal understanding of what the legislation does. Of course, there are very legitimate disputes about how it will work out in practice, as well as legitimate disputes about whether it would be a good thing even if it works the way Democrats say that it will work, but I'm more curious about whether Angle and others have just a basic, minimal sense of what's in the law.
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