Brendan Nyhan

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Sarah Palin's hand notes are the new Rorschach blot of American politics
-My advice? Next time, Palin should write the notes on her shoes like Mike Seaver on Growing Pains
-Inside Edition (!) corrects its misleading reporting on Desiree Jennings case -- mainstream media take note!
-The bizarre asymmetry of presidential powers
-Conspiracy-minded pundits suggest the government is investigating Toyota to help US automakers
-You know "That's how we roll" is no longer cool when David Axelrod is using it on This Week

Obama's phony health care summit

Understatement of the year on Obama's proposed health care summit:

[I]t remains unclear whether a single discussion can begin to bridge the political and substantive policy divide with Republicans, who view their united front against the Democratic bills as a key to their political recovery.

I understand the supposed rationale for the summit is to "engage Congressional Republicans in policy negotiations, share the burden of governing and put more scrutiny on Republican initiatives," as the Times puts it, but let's be clear -- the meeting is an obviously phony PR stunt. The Democrats are locked into the Senate bill plus whatever changes they have to make in a separate reconciliation bill to appease House Democrats. On background, an administration official said "This is not starting over... We are coming with our plan [a merged version of the House and Senate bills]." On the GOP side, the invited Republicans are surely going to use the meeting to promote their own health care agenda, not to try to improve a bill they nearly unanimously oppose. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even said "we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."

In short, Obama is raising expectations for genuine bipartisanship, but it's not going to happen -- the odds of important policy changes coming out of the meeting are virtually nil. If House Democrats then go ahead and pass the Senate bill plus a reconciliation package on a party-line vote, the press will again surely note the contrast between Obama's rhetoric and the realities of legislating in a highly partisan Congress. Is this stunt really worth a delay of more than two weeks?

Update 2/8 9:15 PM: Greg Sargent reports that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is just as dismissive of the exercise as McConnell:

[U]nless the President and Speaker Pelosi are willing to scrap their government take over and hit the reset button, there’s not much to talk about.

Republicans believe the status quo is unacceptable, but so is any health reform package that spends money we don't have or raises taxes on small businesses and working families in a recession.

Death panel myth will not die

Among the right-wing faithful, at least, the myth of the so-called "death panel" persists:

When Andrew Breitbart, the founder of BigGovernment.com, introduced Ms. Palin [to the National Tea Party Convention] by describing her as “the first person to tell us about the death panel,” the crowd cheered.

Kit Bond smears Obama on terror

During a conference call with conservative bloggers yesterday, Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) accused the Obama administration of conducting "a terrorist protection policy" and engaging in a "jihad to close Guantanamo" (MP3 audio):

[0:21] Let me begin by saying that yesterday's hearing with the leaders of the intelligence community shows how this Administration think it's more important to protect the legal rights of terrorists than to protect Americans from terror...

[0:48] What we need in this country is an administration that has a terror-fighting policy, not a terrorist protection policy...

[10:18] They're on this jihad to close Guantanamo, which is a good campaign promise and is designed to keep ACLU, Media Matters, and the extreme left wing, where Obama still has support in the Democratic Party, happy, but it makes our country less safe...

Bond is the latest in a long line of conservatives who have suggested that President Obama is disloyal using language that draws upon the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Sadly, his comments are unlikely to draw any further notice -- it's apparently no longer considered newsworthy to report that senators are smearing the president's loyalty to this country.

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Jon Chait shreds the Luntz memo on financial reform as a classic example of conservative postmodernism.
-New economic research on the difficulty of estimating teacher effects on student achievement (PDF).
-More evidence of the insanity of CA public finance under Prop. 13 (PDF).
-Important Boston Globe investigation of Scott Brown's coat (also repeats the Naomi Wolf myth) -- call the Pulitzers!
-Shame -- former Rep. J.D. Hayworth joins birther caucus.
-Hatch says using reconciliation for health care would be abuse of power, but it has frequently been used for social policy.

New left-wing smears of conservatives

Liberals and Democrats are increasingly adopting the popular post-9/11 tactic of comparing their political opponents to terrorists and murderous regimes. The latest examples come from SEIU president Andy Stern, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

First, via CNSNews.com, Stern referred to Democratic senators who aren't supportive of labor's policy priorities as "terrorists":

Stern criticized Senators Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, who have stalled legislative action with their objections.

“There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we are supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met,” Stern said.

Similarly, Matthews joined Josh Marshall and Frank Rich in comparing Republicans to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia:

What's going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going on in that party, where they're going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, if you're not far right, you're not right enough.

Finally, Kos engaged in a similar smear in which he likened Republicans to the Taliban, a comparison that is apparently going to be the subject of an entire book:

As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world.

The Taliban comparison was coined by former NAACP president Julian Bond in 2001 and quickly came into wide usage, including Senator Tim Johnson, Marshall, Lewis Lapham, Matthews, and Kos. The release of the Kos book will only make things worse.

Obama's misguided spending freeze

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his advisers have repeatedly claimed that they don't listen to DC's conventional wisdom. But Obama's decision to propose a freeze of discretionary non-security spending suggests that the White House misunderstands the problem in the same way as most of the rest of Washington.

The problem, as I've argued, is that Obama's political fortunes are closely tied to the economy -- a variable over which he has relatively little control. With his first midterm election approaching and the economy in terrible shape, an anti-presidential backlash was a virtual certainty. Obama's approach to health care or the economy may have exacerbated this backlash -- the public tends to move in the opposite direction from public policy (though usually after some lag) -- but it's highly unlikely that Obama's policies or communication strategies were the primary cause of his declining approval ratings.

The decision to respond to this problem with a partial spending freeze is both bad politics and bad economics. From an economic perspective, Obama faces a serious risk of a long period of slow growth or even a double-dip recession. He has no politically feasible jobs agenda; his proposed tax credit is tiny relative to the scale of the problem. Imposing additional limits at government spending will only make the problem worse.

From a political perspective, Obama's gesture will have very little effect. The idea seems to be that it will appeal to independents and Republicans who are concerned about the deficit. However, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will not support Obama no matter what he does. They may say they are concerned about the deficit or government spending, but if those concerns are addressed they are likely to find other reasons to oppose the administration. (In addition, their perceptions are likely to be biased.) Deficits might hurt Obama on the margin, but in most cases I tend to think that they're a convenient reason to cite for opposing a president you wouldn't like anyway.

Just to underscore the magnitude of the political and economic problem Obama faces, the White House budget, which was released today, projects "8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 unemployment percent by the end of 2012." While unemployment isn't as good a predictor of election outcomes as income growth, these figures underscores the difficult path to re-election that Obama currently faces. He can still win in 2012 -- seasonally adjusted unemployment in December 1983 was 8.3% and Reagan went on to beat Mondale in a landslide -- but he needs significant growth to do it (regression line excludes the outliers of 1952 and 1968):

Given the historical record, the downside risk of suboptimal economic policy vastly outweighs the symbolic appeal of spending freezes and other short-term deficit measures. Unfortunately for Obama, this is one issue where his administration appears to buy into the conventional wisdom.

Update 2/2 1:30 PM: Matthew Yglesias makes the point more eloquently in a post linking to this one:

Roughly speaking, people got it into their heads over the years that “deficits” are “bad” (which is usually true, but also pretty simplistic) and then the economic situation became very bad, so people have decided that large deficits must be the problem. This is a misunderstanding. An application of a crude, sorta-correct rule of thumb to an unusual situation. It also involves people confusing cause and effect. Steep economic downturns cause large deficits, which is bad. But the deficit is the symptom rather than the cause. Meanwhile, as Brendan Nyhan observes the Obama administration seems eager to pile bad political science on top of the mass public’s bad economics. People are upset, and they say they want a smaller deficit. So Obama’s proposing to give it to them, and seems to have no intention of doing anything about its own forecast of a years-long bleak economic situation.

In political terms, though, the actual performance of the economy in 2012 is going to be much more important to Obama’s re-election than the budget deficit. In particular, by directing its policymaking more at the things that the public thinks are the cause of economic problems rather than the things that economists think are the cause of economic problems, the administration is making is running a huge risk of GOP takeover of the House in 2010. What’s more, they’ve left themselves with almost no margin of error for their own re-election. And for double-irony, the very members of congress who are most endangered by poor short-term economic performance are the ones who are doing the most to urge the administration to adopt a fiscal retrenchment agenda. The faith in vox populi that this reflects (”the public will reward me for doing what they said they wanted me to do, even if it turns out not to work at all”) is sort of touching, but really lacks any basis in the evidence. It’s fascinating to me how few professional political operatives or reporters seem interested in systematic studies of US politics.

See also:
-Seth Masket on pundits misunderstanding Obama's problems
-John Sides on the overemphasis on process as the problem in the health care debate
-Jon Chait on Peter Wehner ridiculing "structural factors" as the primary reason for Obama's decline

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Latest attacks on patriotism and dissent

Former Senator Fred Thompson and the New York Post are the latest conservatives to suggest that President Obama or his administration are sympathetic to terrorists. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Frank Rich joined the emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left in his column today, which smears John McCain as "unpatriotic."

As Media Matters documented, Thompson tweeted the following joke about President Obama's popularity:

You know how we could win the war in Afghanistan? Just send Obama over there to campaign for the Taliban.

Similarly, the New York Post published an editorial questioning whether Obama's Justice Department is on the side of terrorists:

Whose side is the Justice Department on: America's or the terrorists'?

It's just insane that a lawyer who defended Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard -- and who sought constitutional rights for terrorists -- could be one of the Obama administration's top legal officials.

...With high-profile terror cases coming up -- like Abdulmutallab's, and the outrageous Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial in New York -- Americans need to know: Is our government putting in a good-faith effort when it comes to punishing the men who want to blow up our people?

The call to treat terrorists like civilians in court has been all Team Obama.

Which means the president and his administration also owe the American people an answer: Is the government's prosecutorial deck stacked in favor of the terrorists?

Both statements are part of a long line of slurs against Obama's loyalty to this country that capitalize on the misperceptions that he is a Muslim or non-citizen.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich has joined Salon's Joan Walsh and Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan in smearing critics of the president as unpatriotic or traitorous. In his column today, Rich writes that John McCain "epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition" to Obama. Rich provides no evidence to substantiate this assertion other than characterizing McCain as "sneering" during the State of the Union address. It's sadly characteristic of the tone of much of Rich's recent work -- back in November, he compared the GOP to a series of murderous regimes and cults ranging from the Khmer Rouge to Stalinists to the Jacobins.

New design

A friend's suggestion spurred me to dump all the junky banner ads (which pay very little anyway) and move to a cleaner and simpler design. Hope it's an improvement -- let me know what you think...

Twitter roundup

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Gallup reminds us that "President's Support Usually Unaffected by State of Union"
-People whose job it is to write about politics know nothing about politics
-New York Times takes the lead in the "most insipid Haiti article to date" race
-Moving tributes (PDF) to David Foster Wallace (via Ari Kohen)
-Best celebrity memoir title ever? David Hasselhoff's autobiography was called "Don't Hassel the Hoff"
-The bail system is corrupt and unjust
-It seems somehow appropriate that Tommy Franks serves on the board of Chuck E. Cheese (via Peter Bergen)

Jennifer Steinhauer: The proto-Dowd?

As I noted a few years ago, New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer has a penchant for lacing her stories with cutting rhetoric about liberals. It's all too reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, whose derisive coverage of Bill Clinton and other Democrats helped vault her to the paper's op-ed page.

The latest example of Steinhauer's approach appears in her report today on new limits on the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. Late in the article, she works in a gratuitous and unfunny crack about supporters of medical marijuana smelling like patchouli oil:

In a crowded, vaguely patchouli-oil scented [Los Angeles City] Council chamber, advocates for medical marijuana peppered Council members with threats of lawsuits and election challenges.

Similarly, her profile of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi back in 2006 parroted conservative codewords, saying Republicans viewed Pelosi as "an Armani-clad elitist who will help push lawmakers toward an agenda of multicultural, tax-raising appeasement," and misleadingly claimed Pelosi "favors... schools without prayer and death with taxes." The last two phrases are GOP spin -- Pelosi actually opposes organized prayer in schools (not all prayer) and the estate tax (whose elimination Pelosi opposes) only affects a tiny percentage of the Americans who die each year. (The Times later edited the sentence online to correct these problems.)

Soon afterward, Steinhauer again parroted Republican rhetoric, calling California a place where "American values are said to go to die" and writing that the state has an image as "a hotbed of liberal lunacy."

If Dowd ever retires, I bet she's on the short list.

Obama on approval-driven media narratives

On Friday, I argued that the narrative of President Obama not "connecting" with the American public is a symptom of his declining approval ratings, not the cause.

In a new interview with Diane Sawyer, Obama made a similar point about how perceptions of his personality tend to vary with his popularity:

When your poll numbers drop, you're an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you're a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I'm cool and cerebral and cold and detached. If my poll numbers are high, well, he's calm and reasoned.

So that's -- that's the filter through which a lot of this stuff is interpreted.

It's a sad state of affairs when the president understands what the press is doing better than the reporters themselves.

Presidents "connect" when they're popular

Last Monday, I predicted that the combination of an unfavorable political environment for Democrats and the downward trend in President Obama's approval ratings will spur the media to create elaborate narratives about how Obama is not "connecting" with the American people.

Thanks to the special election in Massachusetts, those narratives have already arrived, and they're just as silly as I expected. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, compiles the evidence, which he correctly calls "primitive magical thinking about what presidents can do if they only have just the right message or right tone."

The reality is that presidential messages tend to work in favorable political environments (i.e. strong economies) and not work in unfavorable environments (i.e. weak economies). Consider the example of Bill Clinton, who struggled early in his first term and was portrayed as failing to communicate with the American people. But when the economy boomed, he became popular and easily won reelection. Not surprisingly, during this period, he was seen as a very effective communicator. Both the press and Clinton administration officials tend to attribute the 1996 victory to various tactical choices (moving to the center, running early ads against Bob Dole, etc.), but as Matthew Yglesias notes Clinton's "success is easily explained in terms of the economic expansion."

Or consider Ronald Reagan. He's remembered as the so-called "Great Communicator," but that's after the economy picked up late in his first term and he won a landslide victory over Walter Mondale. However, Reagan was not always viewed that way -- he suffered through a recession early in his term that damaged his political standing (his approval trajectory was very similar to Obama's). The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein reviewed press accounts of Reagan from January 1982, and concluded that "Reagan's manner [was portrayed as moving] from amiable and clear on the big picture to clueless and oblivious to the important details of governing -- and indifferent to suffering -- when things were going bad."

The larger point is, as Bernstein notes, that "character traits are perceived by the press in light of how the president is doing in the polls and in Washington, not the other way around." In other words, the perception that Obama isn't "connecting" is a symptom of his declining political status, not the cause.

How much is health care hurting Dems?

Via John Sides, David W. Brady, Daniel P. Kessler, and Douglas Rivers have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is likely to fuel Democratic panic in Washington over health care:

The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months is more than a conventional midterm rebound. How can a little known Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts? The culprit is the unpopularity of health reform, and it means that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in less liberal places than Massachusetts.

We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November...

Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it's popular, Democratic candidates don't have too much of a problem, but where it's unpopular—and that includes most states—the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle...

Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill...

How do we know that it's the health-reform bill that's to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states?

First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state's voters supported Republicans.

Brady and Rivers are highly respected political scientists (I'm not familiar with Kessler), but I'm not sure we can draw strong conclusions from these data. Since health care passed on a perfect party line vote in the Senate, it's relatively easy to know where an incumbent stands on the issue. And given the salience of the health care debate, the correlation between state opposition to health care reform and support for Republican senate candidates is (a) not surprising and (b) not necessarily causal (especially given that those are aggregate measures).

I tend to think that much of the health care fallout is an expression of economic discontent, but there's certainly an argument to be made that it has exacerbated the public's predictable turn away from liberalism. In either case, however, disentangling these factors is extremely difficult.

Update 1/21 8:25 PM: Matt Blackwell makes a similar argument at the Harvard Social Science Statistics blog.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

The mythical health care compromise

What is going on in Washington? The panic-induced response to Scott Brown's special election victory has pushed President Obama and Congressional Democrats into an obviously incoherent health care strategy:

President Obama signaled on Wednesday that he might be willing to scale back his proposed health care overhaul to a version that could attract bipartisan support, as the White House and Congressional Democrats grappled with a political landscape transformed by the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race.

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on ABC News, notably leaving near-universal insurance coverage off his list of core goals...

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders said they were weighing several options. But some lawmakers in both parties began calling for a scaled-back bill that could be adopted quickly with bipartisan support, and Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that if he could not pass an ambitious health care bill, he would be willing to settle for what he could get. In the interview with ABC, he cited two specific goals: cracking down on insurance industry practices that hurt consumers and reining in health costs.

“We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people,” Mr. Obama said. “We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up, and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements to this bill.”

Republican Congressional aides said a compromise bill could include new insurance industry regulations, including a ban on denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions, as well as aid for small businesses for health costs and possible steps to restrict malpractice lawsuits. But as Mr. Obama noted on ABC, a pared-down package imposing restrictions on insurers might make coverage unaffordable, which is one reason he prefers a broad overhaul...

The idea of "a scaled-back bill that could be adopted quickly with bipartisan support" makes no sense:

1. Why would liberals in the House support a stripped-down bill? They already oppose the Senate bill as too conservative. If they're willing to accept more moderate legislation, the House could just pass the Senate bill and the process would be over.

2. Why would Mitch McConnell or the GOP caucus support a stripped-down bill? Republicans wouldn't cut a deal when the Democrats were in a position of strength -- there's no reason to think they would abandon their scorched-earth strategy right when it seems to be inflicting damage on the Democrats. As the New York Times notes, when McConnell was asked if the health care bill was dead, he said, “I sure hope so."

3. Does anyone think Congress has the patience to go through the legislative process again with a new bill?

4. What is the magical proposal that will attract bipartisan support? As Jonathan Chait correctly notes, any compromise that includes a ban on denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions but lacks a mandate and subsidies won't work:

Cantor does say he wants to ban discrimination against people with preexisting conditions, but for reasons I've explained over and over again, you can't do that without an individual mandate, and you can't do that without subsidies for those who can't afford the mandate. So the preexisting condition stuff is just a way of posturing for a popular goal without admitting you oppose the necessary steps to accomplish it.

The Democrats have very few options besides (a) passing a bill on a party-line vote or (b) abandoning health care reform. The panic has made the party desperate to believe that a bipartisan compromise is possible, but I don't see how it can work.

Update 1/21 12:20 PM: Chait makes a similar point:

[T]he chances of [a scaled-back proposal offered by Ezra Klein], or something remotely like it, passing into law are approximately zero. The Democrats' biggest worry right now, I have been reliably informed (Yes -- reporting! I try not to make a habit of it), is that they think health care has just taken too much time. The want to pivot to an economic message. Writing a new, even smaller health care bill takes a lot of time. There are delicate compromises with interest groups who have the power to destroy legislation if they feel threatened. There are negotiations in two chambers. The senate is feeling incredibly skittish right now and probably unwilling to vote for anything stronger than a resolution saying that if anybody dies because they couldn't afford medical treatment it would be a darn shame. (And that resolution would come after months of begging Olympia Snowe to cast the filibuster-breaking vote.)

There are only two options on health care: Something that involves passing the Senate bill through the House, and nothing. There's no fantasy moderate bipartisan alternative. Once Congress gets that through its head, I think -- I don't know but I think -- they'll make the obvious choice.