Brendan Nyhan

Larry Bartels is a professor of political science at Princeton who recently came and gave a talk here at Duke. He’s working on a very interesting series of papers that are definitely worth a read.

“Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution (PDF) shows that, since World War II, Democratic presidents have consistently produced greater GDP growth, lower unemployment, and lower inequality than Republican presidents (without producing substantially higer inflation). The differences are remarkable and stand up to virtually every challenge that can be thrown at them (outliers, technology, etc.).

So why have Republicans done so well in presidential elections since 1968? Bartels suggests that the answer is a remarkable difference in economic performance during election years. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Democrats have only managed to deliver 1% growth in pre-tax income on average, while Republicans have delivered about 3%.

A second paper (PDF) expands on this point, showing that voters tend to make their choices based on economic performance in the months before re-election, not on performance over the president’s term as a whole.

Finally, his well-known paper “Homer Gets a Tax Cut” (PDF) presents a similarly grim finding: voters largely fail to connect their concerns about growing inequality to the issue of estate tax repeal, and even those who do make the connection still tend to support getting rid of it.

These are depressing but important findings that deserve serious attention from every student of democracy.

Jon Chait and Jacob Weisberg have a nice pair of articles on the hollowness of the so-called conservatism practiced under President Bush and the current Republican leadership in Congress.

Here’s Chait:

The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways that DeLay and Abramoff became central to the conservative movement in Washington. To define big-government conservatism as a form of pragmatism or as the promotion of virtue is to miss its fundamentally corrupt nature. In truth, the most accurate definition — that is, the definition that explains the broadest scope of Bush’s big-government initiatives — is far less edifying: Big government conservatism consists of initiatives that benefit economic elites without using free-market mechanisms.

…Bush’s big-government conservatism represents the coming to fruition of a Republican strategy ten years in the making. When the GOP took control of Congress after the 1994 elections, it undertook an ironclad alliance with the business lobbyists of K Street. The most famous aspect of this alliance was the K Street Strategy, the successful Republican campaign to force business donors to abandon their traditional bipartisanship and instead hire from and donate to the Republican Party exclusively.

The less well-known, but far more important, aspect of the GOP-K Street alliance revolved around policy. By steering government largesse toward their own donors, Republicans could create a self-perpetuating money machine. Industries whose profitability relies on government largesse — and especially those that depend on favors that only Republicans support — will naturally invest some of those profits back into the political party that provides them.

And here’s Weisberg:

In this, the third year that Republicans have controlled everything, a variation on the old interest-group liberalism has emerged as the new governing philosophy. One might have expected that once in command, conservative politicians would work to further reduce Washington’s power and bury the model of special-interest-driven government expansion for good. But one would have been wrong. Instead, Republicans have gleefully taken possession of the old liberal spoils system and converted it to their own purposes. The result is the curious governing philosophy of interest-group conservatism: the expansion and exploitation of government by people who profess to dislike it.

…Today the dominant conservative interests form a rival constellation: corporations, especially in the energy and military contracting sectors, evangelical Christians, wealthy investors, gun owners, and the conservative media. In the daily business of Washington, the old pattern remains in place, only with the substitution of these new supplicants and their new benefactors in the GOP. As in the old days, lobbyists work the halls of Congress and the regulatory agencies, functioning like carpenter ants to build a federal government ever bigger in size and more intrusive in scope.

Indeed. And as Weisberg points out, gerrymandering will make it nearly impossible to dislodge Republican control of Congress until at least 2012, which means that the decadence will continue for some time to come.

A few weeks I asked why Hillary Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate. I think she’s going to get boxed in to making a pledge not to run for president in 2008 that could not be broken without serious damage to her credibility.

Well, it turns out that the media is already polling this, and it’s clear that New Yorkers want her to make a pledge:

A strong majority of New Yorkers want Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to commit to serving a full six-year term if she wins re-election next year, according to a poll released yesterday.

Clinton — who is widely believed to be planning on running for president in 2008 — made that pledge when she first won office in 2000, but she hasn’t done the same for her possible second term in the Senate, which would continue to 2012.

The Quinnipiac University poll found 60 percent of those questioned said Clinton should promise to serve out her full second term, and it revealed a bare majority of voters — 51-41 percent — don’t want her to run for president in 2008.

Even 65 percent of Democrats said she should pledge to serve six years if she’s re-elected.

But at an awards dinner at the Waldorf last night, Clinton wouldn’t make the pledge, refusing to reveal her political plans beyond 2006.

“I’m focused on winning re-election. That’s my goal,” she said.

The calculation she’s presumably making is that she can probably still win without a pledge given her current strength in the polls, which is even greater than I thought (though it’s still very early):

[T]he former first lady trounces all would-be GOP Senate challengers, according to the poll. She beats Gov. Pataki, 60-32 percent; Westchester County DA Jeanine Pirro, 62-27; former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, 63-26; and Ed Cox, son-in-law of the late President Richard Nixon, 63-25.

Cox — a Manhattan lawyer who some in the survey confused with Ed Koch — has told GOP leaders that he is interested in running against Clinton, but the others have publicly or privately ruled it out.

The poll, which surveyed 1,191 registered voters from April 28 to May 2, found Clinton with a strong approval rating — 63 percent, while only 28 percent disapproved.

Sixty-seven percent of voters — including 36 percent of Republicans — said the former first lady deserved re-election.

But even if she gets away without making a pledge, two years of slippery rhetoric and question-dodging will reinforce the meta-narrative that she is a dishonest, opportunistic politician like her husband, particularly as the media picks up on the parallels to him breaking his pledge to serve out his final term as governor of Arkansas. And if that meta-narrative shapes media coverage in 2007-2008, she has no chance in the general election.

So we’re back to same question — why run for re-election in 2006 if she wants to run for president in 2008? If she wants to run in ’08, she shouldn’t run for re-election to the Senate. And if she doesn’t want to run for president, she should pledge not to do so, which would make her re-election a slam dunk. This vacillating stance is going to hurt her chances of achieving either objective.

Michael Kinsley is a brilliant political commentator, but his tired obsession with being counter-intuitive, which dominated his tenure at The New Republic and has since ruined Slate (see here and here), has again reared its ugly head.

His latest column, which I was alerted to by Bob Somerby, makes the counterintuitive case for Bush’s honesty during his press conference:

Above all, Bush was honest and even courageous about Social Security. Social Security is entirely about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. As Bush has discovered in the past few months, there are no shadows to hide in while you fiddle with it. The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.

Bush didn’t go from explicitly denying this to explicitly admitting it. But he went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that’s an admirable difference.

As Somerby wrote, this is truly defining dishonesty down. See CBPP for the full details. Bush has been so egregiously dishonest for his entire presidency that he admits that privatization isn’t a free lunch and the pundits fall all over themselves. What a statesman! How courageous! It’s pathetic.

Then Kinsley moves into a Cohenesque call for compromise that is astonishingly incoherent:

As this column has argued to the point of stupefaction, Bush’s privatization ideas are a mathematical fraud. There is no way that allowing people to manage part of the money they put into the system can produce a surplus to supplement their benefits or cushion the shock of the necessary cuts. But if privatization is truly voluntary, it can’t do much harm. And if that is Bush’s price for being out front on a real solution to the real problem, the Democrats should let him have it.

Unless they are complete morons — always a possibility — the Democrats could end up in the best of all worlds. They know in their hearts that Social Security has got to change in some unpleasant way. Bush, for whatever reason, is willing to take this on and to take most of the heat. And all he wants in return is the opportunity to try something that will alienate people from the Republican Party for generations to come.

Privatization “can’t do much harm”? Even though private accounts would be voluntary, they would do a tremendous amount of harm, draining trillions of dollars in transition costs from the Treasury over the next few decades. And where’s the “real solution” to the “real problem” that Bush is proposing? The plan he’s offered would cover only half of the Social Security shortfall — and that’s before you consider the strain created by private accounts. Last but not least, it’s not at all clear that voters will blame the GOP for private accounts. If both sides go along with the deal, the issue will be muddled by the time their effects become clear.

In short, the result is all too typical — yet another center-left pundit demeaning himself in a desperate attempt to be counter-intuitive. No one wants to be as predictable as Bob Herbert, but why not just focus on getting it right?

Here’s the New York Post on pollster Scott Rasmussen’s effort to put the pseudo-science in political science:

One of the nation’s top pollsters has created a new “Hillary Meter” to measure Sen. Clinton’s move to the political center for a 2008 White House run – it shows she’s made progress but has a long way to go. “Right now, she’s too far away from the center to win unless Republicans nominate someone who is even further away,” said independent pollster Scott Rasmussen.

…Clinton is now 52 points to the left of the political center — a bit closer to center than in January, when she was 59 points to the left. Rasmussen said he created the meter because of his “fascination” with Clinton as “the only defining actor” for 2008.

So I went and looked up how the “Hillary meter” is created. Get ready for this nonsense:

Today’s Hillary Meter shows that perceptions of the New York Senator have moved four points to the left over the past two weeks.

Forty-seven percent (47%) of Americans now believe New York Senator Hillary Clinton is politically liberal. That’s up from 43% two weeks ago, but down from 51% in late January.

Thirty-two percent (32%) of Americans view the former First Lady as a moderate while 8% believe she is politically conservative.

Collectively, these numbers place Senator Clinton a net 56 points to the left of the nation’s political center. Two weeks ago, she was 52 points left of center.

The political center is calculated by subtracting the number of liberals from the number of conservatives among the general public (35% conservative, 18% liberal for a net +17). For the Senator, 8% conservative minus 47% liberal equals a net -39. The minus 39 reading for Senator Clinton is 56 points away from the plus 17 reading for the general public.

This is the dumbest methodology I’ve ever heard of. For one thing, it’s well known that many Americans describe themselves as conservatives but are “operationally liberal” when it comes to their specific policy stances. So the net liberal/conservative differential doesn’t tell us very much about “the center” or where a presidential candidate should be located on a left-right scale. And it’s necessarily a lagging indicator — people aren’t paying close attention to what she’s doing right now. Plus he’s interpreting minor fluctuations in the polls as relevant that could just be survey error.

Here’s a better measure of how liberal Hillary is: her location on a left-right scale compared to other senators in the 108th Congress. This takes into account all the votes she’s cast:

It turns out she was the 12th most liberal senator — almost a standard deviation to the left of the Democratic mean. If she doesn’t reposition herself on policy, she’ll probably lose in 2008 (though a bad economy could put almost any Democrat over the top). But the first step isn’t winning over the American people in Rasmussen’s poll; it’s winning over elites in the media. Her husband convinced them that he was a different kind of Democrat, and then was able to make a similar case to the voters in 1992, in large part because the media reinforced his message. Can she do it? I doubt it. Perceptions of her are so entrenched that it would take the continued slaughter of liberal sacred cows from now until Election Day.

How hard is it to understand Social Security? This is Cohen’s full time job. Come on!

I’ll let Matthew Yglesias do the honors on TPM:

Richard Cohen works up some excellent righteous indignation over the Republican Party’s irrational aversion to taxes, but he seems to have a bad case of Washington Post editorial page disease. “George Bush is doing something interesting with Social Security,” he writes, “I kind of like the idea of personal investment accounts if funding them does not weaken the overall program or add to the nation’s incredible debt.”

That’s a bit like saying I like the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein if nobody gets killed and it doesn’t cost any money. How, exactly, is diverting one third of Social Security’s revenues into another program supposed to be done without weakening the program? Well, obviously, it can’t. [And Cohen’s] idea that “a deal can be made on Social Security” where Bush agrees to raise the FICA cap and Democrats “permit some sort of move toward private accounts” is pure fantasy.

I guess it’s possible, as Brad DeLong says, that Cohen wants add-on accounts rather than carveouts, but if so why didn’t he write that explicitly?

Update 5/3: James Taranto of Best of the Web notes this passage in Cohen’s article:

Whatever the merits of personal investment accounts, they would do nothing to alter the dismal math of Social Security projections. But raising the cap would. Why $90,000? Why not $140,000? Better yet, why not raise it to $140,000 and then raise it to confiscatory levels on obscene payments such as Michael Eisner’s $575.6 million back in 1998 . . .

Then Taranto — try to believe this — compares Cohen’s logic to a suicide bombing:

Raising the cap to $140,000 would amount to an increase in marginal rates of roughly 40% to 45% for taxpayers whose incomes are in the low six figures–a huge tax increase targeted at the most productive Americans. The logic here is similar to that of suicide bombing: It’s worth making a big sacrifice for the sake of making the enemy suffer even more. Somehow, though, we doubt most Americans view Michael Eisner as the enemy.

It’s our political discourse in a nutshell — factual incompetence and vitriol all wrapped up together.

George Will is supposed to be a conservative who is skeptical of government power and bureaucratic mandates. So why is he endorsing this stupid initiative?

Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel. Or it could provide 300,000 new $40,000-a-year teachers without any increase in taxes.

His idea — call it the 65 Percent Solution — is politically delicious because it unites parents, taxpayers and teachers while, he hopes, sowing dissension in the ranks of the teachers unions, which he considers the principal institutional impediment to improving primary and secondary education.

The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district’s education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.

Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reach the classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts to $13 billion. Only four states (Utah, Tennessee, New York, Maine) spend at least 65 percent of their budgets in classrooms. Fifteen states spend less than 60 percent. The worst jurisdiction — Washington, D.C., of course — spends less than 50 percent.

When you write things like the plan “can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel,” shouldn’t alarm bells go off? George needs a Word macro that warns him when he sounds like he’s promoting a pyramid scheme.

The obvious problem is that arbitrary mandates like this are easily evaded and defeated by entrenched interests. Why would we expect that the 65% mandate wouldn’t be sucked up by raises for poorly-performing teachers in the Washington, DC public schools, or wasteful IT spending, or bureaucratic spending reclassified under classroom line items? Isn’t this sort of thing one of the core insights of the conservative critique of government? Why is Will so blind to it?

The Washington Post discovers that the narrowest presidential reelection since Woodrow Wilson was not, in fact, a mandate:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon — the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad. In Bush’s case, this includes restructuring Social Security and the tax code and installing a group of judges he was unable to seat in his first term. This was the error that nearly sank Bill Clinton’s presidency in his first years in office in 1993 and 1994 when he put forth a broad health care plan, and that caused then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican “Revolution” to stall in 1995 in a confrontation over cutting spending for popular domestic programs.

Indeed — it’s a classic misreading of public opinion of the sort predicted in Politicians Don’t Pander. The increasingly ideological folks in our political class win an election, think they can manipulate public opinion, and try to go too far in implementing their ideological goals. Then the public pulls back, and we swing in the other direction. Christopher Wlezien describes something similar called the “thermostat effect” in preferences for spending — when it goes up, the public’s preferences for more spending go down (just as you turn the temperature down on the thermostat when it gets too hot).

The problem is that President Bush hasn’t realized that the public isn’t with him — the lesson he’s learned from his father and his first term is that bull-headed stubbornness wins political fights. So he’s staking his second term on Social Security. But unlike tax cuts, private accounts are not popular, and he doesn’t realize that he (like all presidents) generally can’t move the numbers on domestic policy initiatives (see Politicians Don’t Pander and On Deaf Ears). In addition, his approval ratings are under 50%, the public hates his handling of Social Security, and is slowly turning against the war in Iraq — more than 50% of the public now thinks it wasn’t worth fighting.

Bush may not be part of the “reality-based community,” but reality will catch up with him soon enough.

(Related: See my previous posts on mandate claims.)

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a nice summary of the President’s deceptive statements during his press conference:

1. Obscuring the fact that those electing private accounts would have to pay back Social Security through reductions in their Social Security benefits…
2. Not explaining that under the option he touted to allow workers to invest their private accounts entirely in Treasury bonds, workers would be guaranteed to lose money…
3. Portraying Treasury bonds in personal accounts as rock-solid, but Treasury bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund as shaky IOUs…
4. Misrepresenting how people who die before retirement fare under Social Security and how they would fare under his proposal…
5. Portraying the private accounts he is proposing are merely what Congress has already provided for itself…

Read the whole thing for full details.

I’m sure others have linked to this, but I can’t let it go by without noting it for the record:

Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday.
“Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,” Robertson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“I think we have controlled Al Qaeda,” the 700 Club host said, but warned of “erosion at home” and said judges were creating a “tyranny of oligarchy.”

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years – worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War – Robertson didn’t back down.

“Yes, I really believe that,” he said. “I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together.”

Just “a few bearded terrorists” are nothing compared to those crazy judges! Robertson’s statement is similar to his suggestion that the US was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which blamed the courts for sinning against God:

“We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government, we’ve stuck our finger in your eye,” said Robertson. “The Supreme Court has insulted you over and over again, Lord. They’ve taken your Bible away from the schools. They’ve forbidden little children to pray. They’ve taken the knowledge of God as best they can, and organizations have come into court to take the knowledge of God out of the public square of America.”

This man has no place in our public discourse.