Brendan Nyhan

Writing in Newsweek, Evan Thomas bemoans the increase in partisanship, claiming it decreases participation among the masses:

[T]he real divide, the separation that may matter more to the future of American democracy, is between the political junkies and everyone else. The junkies watch endless cable-TV news shows and listen to angry talk radio and feel passionate about their political views. They number roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Princeton professor Markus Prior, who tracks political preferences and the media. Then there’s all the rest: the people who prefer ESPN or old movies or videogames or Facebook or almost anything on the air or online to politics. Once upon a time, these people tended to be political moderates; now they are turned off or tuned out. Aside from an uptick in the 2004 presidential election, voter turnout has drifted downward since its modern peak in 1960 (from 63 percent to the low 50s), despite much easier rules on voter registration and expensive efforts to get out voters, writes Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of “The Vanishing Voter.” For all the press hoopla over the coming presidential primaries, turnout rates are likely to dip way below 30 percent, he predicts.

It’s axiomatic that democracies need an informed and engaged citizenry. But America’s is indifferent or angry. Washington has entered an age of what Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004, calls “hyperpartisanship.” Partisanship is nothing new, or necessarily bad—after all, it can offer voters clear choices. But it has become poisonous.

Josh Marshall objects, citing this post by Kos arguing that “the last election in which this nation lacked a partisan media was 1988, and turnout was 50.11%” but “with a strong conservative partisan media, and with a nascent progressive partisan media, [turnout] was at 56.69%” in 2004.

But we can go even further. Turnout hasn’t declined at all once you take into account the increasing proportion of the population that is ineligible to vote, as George Mason political scientist Michael McDonald points out. In fact, it’s increasing to the highs of the 1950s and 1960s:

[The idea that ever fewer Americans are showing up at the polls should be put to rest. What’s really happening is that the number of people not eligible to vote is rising — making it seem as though turnout is dropping.

Those who bemoan a decline in American civic society point to the drop in turnout from 55.2 percent in 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote, to the low point of 48.9 percent in 1996. But that’s looking at the total voting-age population, which includes lots of people who aren’t eligible to vote — namely, noncitizens and convicted felons. These ineligible populations have increased dramatically over the past three decades, from about 2 percent of the voting-age population in 1972 to 10 percent today.

When you take them out of the equation, the post-1972 “decline” vanishes. Turnout rates among those eligible to vote have averaged 55.3 percent in presidential elections and 39.4 percent in midterm elections for the past three decades. There has been variation, of course, with turnout as low as 51.7 percent in 1996 and rebounding to 60.3 percent by 2004. Turnout in the most recent election, in fact, is on a par with the low-60 percent turnout rates of the 1950s and ’60s.

On the other hand, it is true that the public expresses a preference for moderation and suffers from widening inequalities in political information.

A Gallup poll released Dec. 20 finds that Hillary Clinton generates far more fear among opposing partisans than any other candidate:

[A] question included in the November and December Gallup Panel surveys finds a majority of Republicans alarmed by the prospect of a Clinton presidency, and insufficient positive sentiment among Democrats to neutralize Republicans’ alarm.

Asked whether they would be “excited,” “pleased,” “disappointed,” or “afraid” if each of various candidates became president, more than half of Republicans (62%) say they would be afraid if Clinton were elected. On the flip side, barely half as many Democrats (35%) say they would be excited by this outcome.

No other candidate from either party generates as much cross-party fear as Clinton does among Republicans. The closest are John Edwards with 31%, Obama with 30%, and Giuliani with 29%.

To me, this is evidence against the Ezra Klein hypothesis that Hillary is as electable as the other Democrats. As I wrote before, it has to be harder to win a general election when your opponents start out energized against you. (Gallup’s analysis gives more weight to her performance in recent trial heats, which I see as poor predictors of performance.)

A New York Times article on a third-party group supporting John Edwards includes a great quote on the legal definition of “coordination” (which is prohibited):

Legal experts say the restrictions on coordination between campaigns and third-party groups are narrowly defined and difficult to apply.

“The definition of ‘coordination’ has been one of the most difficult legal concepts for the F.E.C. to grapple with for years and years,” said Kenneth Gross, a veteran campaign finance lawyer. “I don’t know if my wife and I met the standard for coordination before we decided to have a child.”

The recent feeding frenzy over Mitt Romney’s exaggerations is an example of everything that’s wrong with the way the media covers politics in general and political dishonesty in particular. It is driven by perceptions of personality and character (the feeling among journalists that Romney is a phony) and has nothing to do with public policy.

Indeed, it’s almost a perfect test of hypocrisy for liberals who denounced the media’s obsession with Al Gore’s penchant for exaggeration (which was, to be sure, far more pervasive and misleading). So why have so few of them spoken up?

Ezra Klein, to his credit, says what needs to be said:

I don’t really feel like courting a “wanker of the day” award, but Romney’s statement that he “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. when, really, he just knew — or thought he knew — that his father was marching with Martin Luther King Jr., just isn’t a big deal. More to the point, it’s not the sort of media feeding frenzy that should be validated, even when it’s against a figure as odious as Romney. This is exactly the sort of crap the press pulled on Gore, exactly the sort of thing they routinely haul out against politicians they want to destroy. Sometimes, the leader in their gunsight is a good man, and sometimes he is not. But the press corps’ ability to inflate every misstatement or rhetorical overstep in the final months of a year-long campaign into a Question of Character seems like a power we don’t necessarily want to bless them with. Romney’s sins are legion, his panders clear, his political positions a mixture of the opportunistic and the idiotic. Attack him on that. Not a line about something he thought his father did.

Who else? Anyone?

I missed this a few weeks ago — some straight talk on taxes and revenue from the newly resurgent John McCain (via Steve Benen):

[W]hen he came to the Globe Wednesday, McCain took refuge in a supply-side myth: the notion that President Bush’s tax cuts have created a compelling revenue surge.

Queried about funding programs like expanded healthcare for children by letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire, McCain replied, “I would suggest that most economists agree that there was an increase in revenues . . . associated with the tax cuts.” Letting those tax cuts expire might actually have the opposite effect on revenues, the Republican presidential candidate warned.

Asked specifically about the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves, McCain said that “a lot of economists” believe the Bush tax cuts had stimulated the economy and that without them, “the economy would not have boomed, and therefore you would not have seen these increases in revenues.”

His campaign later insisted McCain didn’t mean that tax cuts pay for themselves. But the notion that tax cuts somehow leave the federal government with as much revenue – or nearly as much – as it would have had without them is a popular one in the Republican universe.

I love the claim that “McCain didn’t mean that tax cuts pay for themselves.” Obviously he was trying to leave that impression; why else would he say what he did?

On a related note, Matthew Yglesias recently claimed that “Mitt Romney, presumably under Greg Mankiw’s influence, has always carefully refrained from saying he thinks cutting taxes increases revenue.” This is false, however:

“If you lower taxes enough, you create more growth,” Romney said in a video excerpt on his Web site from a closed-door presentation he made to the Club for Growth, a political organization that favors low taxes, in March 2007.

“And if you create growth, you get more jobs,” Romney continued. “You get more jobs, more people are paying taxes. You get more taxes paid, the government has more money by charging lower tax rates.”

Indeed, as I’ve shown, Rudy Giuliani has made similar claims (here, here and here), as have McCain (here and here), Romney, and Fred Thompson (here and here). We’re still waiting for word from Mike Huckabee…

Via TNR’s Michael Crowley, the New York Times published a short item (backed up by TPM) finding that the Politico story alleging Rudy Giuliani hid security expenses for his affair was misleading. This is bad no matter what. However, Crowley attributes Giuliani’s decline in the polls to the story:

Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy has been derailed largely thanks to a media frenzy around charges that he used city budgeting tricks to cover up his extramarital Hamptons excursions…

[I]t’s stunning when you think about it how much damage this story seems to have done to him. Perhaps it was just a vehicle for voters who knew little except for his 9/11 performance to learn that there’s a big messy underside to the guy.

Crowley is right that Giuliani’s decline in the polls roughly coincides with the publication of the story:

However, if you take a closer look at the pollster.com graphic above or the archive of polls at pollingreport.com, it appears that Giuliani was already declining in the polls by the time of the story’s publication on Nov. 28. Did the story contribute to his decline? Sure. But it’s far more likely that Giuliani was declining because Republican primary voters began to realize that he’s a social liberal. (How many of them have even heard of the story? I’d say not that many.)

You can tell a similar story, as John Sides notes on The Monkey Cage, about the importance of the “macaca” incident in the Virginia Senate race of 2006, which was only part of the story of the race, but has been elevated to being the determinative incident.

To take yet another example, the famous JFK-Nixon debate has become a trite anecdote about Kennedy winning due to the newfound importance of television. But the outcome of the race was essentially a statistical tie.

All of these events “matter,” but we should be wary about neat event-based explanations of campaign outcomes. Humans — and especially journalists — are skilled at constructing narratives after the fact. But it doesn’t mean that those stories are right.

Finally! I’ve been questioning Hillary Clinton’s claims to be the candidate of “experience” since January, and Bill Clinton recently made an obnoxious comment about voters “roll[ing] the dice” with Obama because of his supposed lack of experience.

Nonetheless, the press has largely let her claims to superior experience go without scrutiny… until now. The New York Times’s Patrick Healy has a story in tomorrow’s edition showing that her experience in the White House — the basis for her claim — was not as deep or extensive as she has suggested:

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jawboned the president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.

But during those two terms in the White House, Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti or Rwanda. And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal dragged on.

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”

Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency, and on the campaign trail have increasingly been challenging her assertions of unique experience. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned “what experiences she’s claiming” as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president. And last Friday, he suggested that more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration were supporting his candidacy than hers. (Hillary Clinton quickly released a list of 80 who were supporting her.)

Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.

An interview with Hillary Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.

It can’t be said often enough: Obama has been in elected office longer than she has, and they have the same amount of executive experience (zero).

Brad DeLong denounced the infamously awful rumor-promoting Perry Bacon piece in the Washington Post by calling it a “concern-troll hit piece” (twice). I’m not an expert on obscure liberal blog jargon, but I have been called a “concern troll.” As I found out, the phrase usually used to attack “anyone who calls for civility in a blog, and/or centrist Democrats” in the same way that conservatives use “political correctness” to stigmatize criticism of conservatives or offensive speech. What’s confusing is that a stereotypical “concern troll” would criticize vitriol on liberal blogs, whereas Bacon gave credence to (false) conservative-promoted rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim and went to a madrassa. So what is DeLong talking about?

Update 12/27 1:03 AM: DeLong replies in a comment:

In general, one should first consult Wikipedia:

> Troll (Internet) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Concern troll

>A concern troll is a pseudonym created by a user whose point of view is opposed to the one that the user’s sockpuppet claims to hold. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group’s actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed “concerns”…

Perry Bacon assumes the POV of somebody watching Obama trying to deal with those who are spreading the rumors. Perry Bacon never acknowledges that the main effect of his story is to further spread the rumors. It’s the false assumption of a POV that does not correspond to the author’s real intentions or the articles major effects that makes it “concern.” It’s the fact that the article is intended to and has the effect of spreading misinformation, confusion, and disorder that makes it “troll.”

This is, apparently, the most specific definition of the term. See, in particular, this passage from the Time article linked in the Wikipedia entry for “troll”:

Concern troll: Noun, derived from “internet troll.” A more subtle beast than your standard troll, this species posts comments that appear to be sympathetic to the topic being discussed but who, in reality, wishes to sow doubt in the minds of readers. In a 2006 New Hampshire Congressional campaign, a Republican staffer resigned after reports that he had posted to liberal blogs claiming to be a Democrat who thought the party should give up on the race.

As a result, DeLong has to contort himself to equate Bacon to an online saboteur intentionally trying to sow doubt among participants in an online forum. Awful as the piece may be, Brad has no idea what Bacon’s “real intentions” were or what “the article is intended to” do. And speaking as someone who has been called a “concern troll,” I can say that my intention has never been to “[spread] misinformation, confusion, and disorder.”

The jargon of “concern troll” — which obliterates these distinctions — is increasingly used online by liberals to silence and stigmatize disfavored views of any sort. As I pointed out in my first post on the term, it’s striking similar to the way conservatives began to use the term “political correctness”:

At first, [the term] referred to specific incidents in which colleges and other institutions attempted to enforce liberal norms some perceived as oppressive. Over time, however, as UCLA’s Phil Agre argued, some speakers began to use the phrase (or the variants “politically correct”/”politically incorrect”) to imply coercion without making a specific argument that it had actually taken place or stigmatize any opposition to a political view as “political correctness.” In this way, a set of associated stereotypes could be triggered in increasingly vague and pathological ways.

It’s an almost perfect symmetry (though on a much smaller and more limited scale).

Paul Krugman’s column today on responsibility for the subprime mess includes a wild anecdote about deregulatory fever:

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

This is the kind of stuff that people will look back on in horror in the future.

For the next few weeks, we’re in CA, MA and NH visiting family so blogging will be intermittent until early January…