Brendan Nyhan

Wow. Based in large part on the Abramoff scandal, Stuart Rothenberg projects an eight-seat Democratic gain in the House of Representatives, and no longer thinks a takeover of the chamber is impossible:

With a little over nine months to go until Election Day, Democrats are headed for gains in the United States House of Representatives. The only question is exactly how big those gains will be.

Democrats need a net gain of fifteen seats to get to the magic number of 218 seats and control of the chamber. That would make Representative Nancy Pelosi Speaker, install Democrats as chairs of House committees, and fundamentally change the political environment on Capitol Hill and nationally for President George W. Bush’s final two years.

I recently raised my projections of likely Democratic gains to five to eight seats based on the continued deepening of the Abramoff scandal and continued voter sentiment for change. While it is still difficult to “count” eight certain Democratic House takeovers, the combination of macropolitical factors and credible Democratic opportunities add up to likely Democratic gains in the mid-single digits.

But, like the Federal Reserve, which often signals future interest rate shifts by noting that it has a “bias” to higher or lower rates, I like to indicate whether my projected range is likely to move one way or the other. And my current view is that projections of Democratic gains are more likely to grow than to shrink.

While Republicans could benefit from improved news from Iraq, perceived progress in the war on terror, an ethics/reform agenda, or future circumstances that no one can now anticipate, I think it far more likely that the political landscape, which currently tilts to the Democrats, could tilt even more toward Democratic House candidates later this year.

While a 15-seat Democratic gain remains difficult, I no longer think it impossible. Yes, Republicans do have a structural advantage in the House, and Democrats don’t have as many top tier challengers at DCCC chairman Rahm Emanuel would have you believe he does. But the electorate’s mood allows for Democratic prospects to improve further over the next nine months. Stay tuned.

Matt Bai, the New York Times Magazine’s political reporter, illustrates the essential formula for “objective” journalism: all criticisms must be balanced with praise, no matter how strained or implausible. That gives rise to incoherence like this:

Unlike most of his Democratic detractors, Bush has shown the vision to rethink time-honored orthodoxy, even at his own political peril; no matter what his critics may say, it took no small amount of courage to ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is or if the tax code could be simpler and less punitive. He recognizes that government should be more flexible and more consumer-oriented. But in every specific case, it seems, Bush has quickly settled on solutions that aim to dismantle government rather than to improve it and that leave the average family more insecure rather than more enabled. In Bush’s version of the “ownership society,” those who already own nice homes and stock portfolios get to make more choices about their health care and retirement, while everyone else gets to take his chances.

This is just nonsense. It certainly took political courage for Bush to try to alter Social Security, but Bai’s framing of what happened is all wrong. The President did not “ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is,” nor did he “quickly settle” on a solution that “aim[s] to dismantle government.” Instead, since 2000, Bush had backed individual accounts, which would inherently weaken the program’s finances by diverting payroll tax dollars away from the trust fund. Everyone knew it. And so it should not have been surprising that the overall package that he ultimately advanced would have moved the program’s date of insolvency forward to 2030. It’s not like the president went into the debate with an open mind.

Similarly, the account of Bush’s tax cuts is bizarre. It took no courage to push through the 2001 tax cut at a time when the surplus seemed huge and permanent. Indeed, the courageous politicians tried to warn against trusting overly optimistic revenue projections, to little avail. And President Bush’s 2003 tax cut was courageous only in the sense that it takes chutzpah to suggest that the way to stimulate the economy is by reducing taxes on dividends. Bush had just swept the 2002 elections, and Democrats were demoralized.

More importantly, as before, President Bush did not “quickly settle” on the 2001 plan; it was the central plank of his 2000 campaign. And rather than adjust to changing circumstances as the economy stalled, he simply reframed the plan, which was originally supposed to return the surplus to taxpayers, as a recession-fighter.

In short, President Bush may have gone into both debates seeking to dismantle government by phasing out Social Security and driving the government into deficit. These are openly stated goals of many of his allies. Bai ignores this possibility, asserting that Bush’s intentions were pure, but that he just happened to choose policies that advanced the conservative goal of dismantling the federal government.

As happens all too often, “objective” journalism is getting in the way of the facts.

The director of the Pew Research Center discusses the vain hope for a third party or a “strong, independent political figure” with the Christian Science Monitor:

If there is a genuine desire to bring the country together over policy issues, says Mr. Kohut, the more productive avenue would come via the rise of a third party or strong, independent political figure. But “that only happens in presidential [election] times,” he says. “We’re a good deal ahead of that discussion.”

When do those things happen in presidential election times? In recent years, Kohut could point to Ross Perot’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns, but Perot never came close to winning the presidency and his Reform Party fizzled. In 1980, John Anderson pulled in 5 million votes an an independent presidential candidate, but he was never a serious threat to win.

More generally, every major party candidate since the rise of the primary system has had to win over his fellow partisans, which means taking stances that do not unite the country on policy. The mythology of the “strong, independent political figure” is a holdover from the days when generals like Eisenhower and Grant were put up as supposedly non-political candidates for the presidency, and third parties are, in general, a mythology (the last one to displace a major party was the Republicans in the mid-nineteenth century).

I’m glad this subject so fascinates reporters and pundits, but it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The winner of the 2008 election will be a major party nominee. The end.

Mike Pence claims President Bush is “a man of unimpeachable integrity” and that “[t]he American people have profound confidence in him”:

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., who appeared with Thune on “Fox News Sunday,”, said all White House correspondence, phone calls and meetings with Abramoff “absolutely” should be released.

“I think this president is a man of unimpeachable integrity,” Pence said. “The American people have profound confidence in him. And as Abraham Lincoln said, `Give the people the facts and republican governance perhaps will be saved.’”

But here’s what the polls actually say:

ABC News: “Bush’s bottom-line job rating — 42 percent of Americans approve of his work, 56 percent disapprove — is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since Watergate hammered Richard Nixon.

Time Magazine: “Although about half (48%) think that overall the Bush administration has been about as honest and truthful
as other presidential administrations, one-third (34%) think the Bush administration has been less honest
and trustworthy. Almost one-in-five (17%) think the current administration has been more honest and
trustworthy.”

Harris Poll: “A majority of U.S. adults believe the Bush administration generally misleads the public on current issues, while fewer than a third of Americans believe the information provided by the administration is generally accurate.”

In an interview with the German newspaper Spiegel linked on Drudge, Steven Spielberg denies the obvious implication of the closing shot of “Munich”:

SPIEGEL: In a long closing sequence you show the — then still standing — Twin Towers of Manhattan, implying that you see a link between September 5, 1972 in Munich and September 11, 2001 in New York.

SPIELBERG: I don’t think that these acts can be compared in terms of their perpetrators. There is no connection between the Palestinian terror of that time and the al-Qaida terror of today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.

So why does the film make the implicit — and facile — comparison? Spielberg told Time that he had to show the World Trade Center because it was still standing during the period portrayed in the movie, but the camera lingers on the towers in a closing shot that was obviously meant to have some larger meaning. Denying it now won’t change that fact.

With so many pundits making absurd claims about a third party in the US, it’s refreshing to see Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias taking a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of politics.

Drum writes in response to a New Republic article by an ABC News correspondent who notes the parallels between 1994 and 2006, but points out that liberals lack a figure comparable to Newt Gingrich. As Drum points out, though, Gingrich himself was not the key factor:

Yes, Gingrich was a pit bull, but the biggest thing he had going for him was simpler: he was on the tail end of a 30-year shift of white, mostly Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Pressure had been building along that particular tectonic plate for a long time, and in 1994 Gingrich was able to turn it into an electoral earthquake. Instead of gaining a few seats per election, he gained them all at a single time.

Without that underlying dynamic, the 1994 landslide would have been a fizzle, gaining a dozen seats, not 54. So while Democrats might very well need a Newt Gingrich of their own, what they really need if they want to win back control of Congress is a tectonic shift they can take advantage of — and so far I just haven’t seen any big, pent-up frustration on the part of center-right voters that might turn large numbers of them into center-left voters instead.

People have tended to overemphasize the need to mirror the specifics of 1994 in terms of leadership, “nationalizing” the election, running on a specific agenda, etc. But as Drum suggests, leaders riding a huge demographic/political shift tend to look brilliant. It’s the same reason we overanalyze the tactics of various winning presidential campaigns that largely won because of the state of the economy. For instance, Reagan’s 1984 campaign and Clinton’s 1996 campaign were lauded for their successful tactics, but it’s hard to imagine how either could have lost given the circumstances. Under those conditions, nearly any strategy will look prescient.

Yglesias makes a similarly important point about this passage from an E.J. Dionne column:

Canadians, devoted as always to subtlety and prudence, refused to give Harper a majority. Diane Ablonczy, a Conservative parliamentarian from Alberta, offered a perceptive take on the voters’ verdict. She said they “want to test-drive the Conservative Party” before allowing it to govern without help. In stable democracies, voters can take test-drives.

In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.

As Yglesias writes, however, “voters” don’t decide who gets a majority directly. The preferences that voters express are filtered through electoral and legislative institutions, resulting in a final outcome:

[I]t’s important to be careful in attribute collective intentions to voters in legislative elections. Both Hamas in Palestine and the Conservative Party in Canada won pluralities, rather than majorities, of the total votes cast. Indeed, the Conservatives’ margin over the Liberals in Canada was bigger than Hamas’ margin over Fatah in Palestine. But Hamas wound up with a majority of seats and the Conservatives didn’t because Canada and Palestine use different electoral systems (Canada uses first past the post voting in single-member constituencies like the US and UK, Palestine has a mixed system whose details I don’t understand) and the third party dynamics in the two countries are different.

In short, electoral outcomes are mostly the result of state of the economy, long-term partisan trends, and electoral/legislative institutions, not personalities and tactics. If only more pundits appreciated this point…

Postscript — For more on these points:
–The Macro Polity by Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson measures the influence of the state of the economy and macropartisanship on electoral trends in the US
–Issue Evolution by Carmines and Stimson explores how the issue of race transformed the two major parties in the US — a shift that culminated in the 1994 election
–Making Votes Count by Gary Cox analyzes how electoral laws shape party strategy and voter behavior

One of the reasons we started Spinsanity, frankly, was to embarrass those in politics who would try to deceive the public. Even though we knew that we could never catch all the spin, we figured we could at least strengthen the norm against deception, which had atrophied in recent years.

Oprah Winfrey’s belated public shaming of James Frey for his largely fictitious memoir willl serve, I think, the same purpose in book publishing, only on a vastly larger scale:

In an extraordinary reversal of her defense of the author whose memoir she catapulted to the top of the best-seller lists, Oprah Winfrey rebuked James Frey, the author of “A Million Little Pieces,” on her television show yesterday for lying about his past and portraying the book as a truthful account of his life.

“I feel duped,” Ms. Winfrey told Mr. Frey. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”

She added: “I sat on this stage back in September and I asked you, you know, lots of questions, and what you conveyed to me and, I think, to millions of other people was that that was all true.”

In particular, she attacked the way the publishing industry fails to fact-check the books it releases:

Ms. Winfrey pointed out that her producers had asked about reports of the book’s truth in September, after the Hazelden counselor raised doubts, and that they were reassured by Random House.

“We asked if you, your company, stood behind James’s book as a work of nonfiction at the time, and they said absolutely,” Ms. Winfrey said. “And they were also asked if their legal department had checked out the book, and they said yes. So in a press release sent out for the book in 2004 by your company, the book was described as brutally honest and an altering look at — at addiction. So how can you say that if you haven’t checked it to be sure?”

Ms. Talese replied that while the Random House legal department checks nonfiction books to make sure that no one is defamed or libeled, it does not check the truth of the assertions made in a book.

Ms. Winfrey replied, “Well, that needs to change.”

Let’s hope that Oprah’s actions can help spur that change, as the former publisher of Time Warner suggested:

One former publisher said he believed that the publishing industry would have to change its practices at the behest of its biggest patron, Ms. Winfrey. Laurence J. Kirshbaum, who recently retired as the chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group and who now runs his own literary agency, said in an interview yesterday that “there is no question what she said will have a far-reaching impact on our business.”

“Agents, publishers and authors are all going to have to be much more cautious in the way they approach the nonfiction market,” Mr. Kirshbaum said. “Traditionally, publishers have not done fact-checking and vetting. But I think you are going to see memoirs read not only from a libel point of view but for factual accuracy. And where there are questions of possible exaggeration or distortion, the author is going to need to produce documentation.”

Update 1/27: Random House is already scrambling…

Last week, Harry Reid’s office released a document that attacked a number of Republican senators. Although Reid later apologized, it’s noteworthy that the document included early criticism of Senator George Allen’s ugly racial history, which is likely to become an issue in Allen’s 2008 presidential run:

[T]he document reached back into GOP Sen. George Allen’s days as Virginia governor to note that he once “kept a noose and a confederate flag in his office and home” (a controversy dating from the 1993 campaign) and in 1994 called the federal government a “beast of tyranny and oppression.”

This picture, from a New York Times article on Alberto Gonzales’ speech at Georgetown, is a case study in effective protest:

Amen.

The left made Cindy Sheehan the face of anti-war protest in this country. And they must – must – disavow her after this comment in Venezuela:

Anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, joined more than 10,000 anti-globalization activists in Caracas, where she hailed Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez.

“I admire him for his resolve against my government and its meddling,” said Sheehan, who gained notoriety when she camped outside US President George W. Bush’s ranch last year to protest the Iraq war. She said she hoped to meet Chavez later in the week.

Does she admire Chavez’s record on human rights and civil liberties? He is a thug and a demagogue; Sheehan’s decision to praise him puts her outside the bounds of the political mainstream in the US. Eventually, the media will stop going easy on her and report just how extreme her positions are.