Brendan Nyhan

There’s a strange reflex people have when reading political articles they don’t like: rather than respond on the merits, they immediately allege hypocrisy to defuse the charge. So when I criticized Robert Byrd’s invocation of Hitler’s takeover of Germany during Senate debate over the “nuclear option” in my last post, one of the commenters immediately replied with a list of Republican references to Nazi Germany, writing “From the Congressional Record… because it is perfectly acceptable to equate an argument with Naziism as long as the argument is uttered by a Republican.” The post ends with this: “I can’t help but admire the blatant hypocrisy.”

Why is this knee-jerk reaction so common? We got it constantly at Spinsanity – we’d post something about how side A did X, and people would immediately write in and either say “But side B did X before” (or “side B does Y and that’s more important”). There’s no logic to either response. What Republicans said before doesn’t make Byrd’s comments any more or less appropriate. Also, no one’s established that the Republicans who criticized Byrd have made Nazi references themselves in the past, so it’s not even clear that the hypocrisy charge is more than just fuzzy “your side did it too” nonsense.

(For the record, we wrote a large number of posts about inappropriate Nazi/Hitler rhetoric at Spinsanity, so there are no grounds for accusing me of hypocrisy — not sure if the commenter was doing so or not.)

We need to get Robert Byrd out of the Senate. Comparing the “nuclear option” to Hitler’s takeover of the German government is only the latest of many, many stupid and offensive things he’s said over the years. And yes, he carries a copy of the Constitution around, knows lots of parliamentary procedure, and quotes Cicero. I don’t care. Get him out of there.

New polls from New York Times/CBS News, Pew and even the Senate Republican Conference confirm what we already knew – support for private accounts is cratering. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of Senate Finance, is hinting that Republicans should drop them entirely.

Yet even as the GOP flails around for a deal to cut, the President is planning a “60-day, 60-stop barnstorming tour to promote the president’s plan for overhauling Social Security.” This begs the question: why is Bush not running away from private accounts as fast as he can? I don’t know, but here are some possible answers:

1) Overconfidence. Bush has won every debate in which he’s ignored the naysayers — particularly the first tax cut and Iraq — and outlasted two opponents (Gore and Kerry) who many observers thought would beat him. He thinks the key to political victory is standing strong and not giving in unless it’s absolutely necessary at the last minute. A report in the Washington Post today suggests that this might be the case: “Despite polls showing support for the plan slipping, Bush is confident he is winning the first phase of the public debate over Social Security and has no plans to significantly alter his strategy for enacting the most dramatic changes ever to the venerable system, said senior White House officials who have talked to Bush.”

A somewhat different version of this comes from Robert Novak, who claims that Bush “has confided to close associates that he committed a whopper on Social Security. He admitted error in pushing for new personal accounts while not stressing the repair of the safety net for seniors.” In this sense, it’s a different kind of overconfidence — overconfidence in the administration’s ability to change its message and win the debate, rather than understanding that private accounts will face staunch opposition regardless of what Bush “stresses.”

2) Strategic calculation. Some people in the White House may be realizing that private accounts are a political loser, but they need to keep blustering to hold Republicans in line so that they can cut a deal before Bush goes down in flames. This is the alternative interpretation of the quote above.

3) Desperation. Bush has put all his so-called “political capital” on the table, and it turns out that there isn’t much of it. He was re-elected by the narrowest margin of any incumbent president in decades and the American people deny he won a mandate in post-election polling, particularly when it comes to Social Security. If he loses on Social Security, his whole second term unravels, as Noam Scheiber suggests on his New Republic blog:

The real impact here, I think, is psychological. If privatization fails–particularly so early on–both congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans will realize Bush is no longer invulnerable. Republicans members of Congress will stop snapping to attention when the White House calls. Democrats will feel emboldened to oppose the administration on any number of other initiatives. Suddenly the whole dynamic of congressional debates changes. One obvious place to look for this is any tax reform push down the line. Another is judicial confirmations–though the Democrats risk over-reaching here if they get too cocky. In general, I’d expect pretty much everything you normally associate with lame-duckness, only much, much sooner.

Meanwhile, some of the President’s supporters continue to be observing this debate from another dimension. Former White House economist Gregory Mankiw and a former staffer who served with him offer this “advice” to Democrats in the Wall Street Journal — “Embrace personal accounts. By themselves, voluntary personal accounts are neither a panacea nor a threat to the social safety net. The key is how the system works. So stop objecting to the concept of personal accounts and focus on the details.” And the WSJ editorial board argues that the President should propose diverting even more revenue into private accounts to win the debate. Of course, all the negative effects of private accounts, including trillions of dollars in deficits over the next several decades, would be intensified by such a choice. Why anyone would think that would make private accounts more popular is beyond me.

Apparently, creating your own version of reality isn’t as easy as the White House thought, but they and their allies are certainly trying…

The wheels are visibly coming off the wagon:

Associated Press (poll conducted 2/22-2/24): “More than half of Americans, 55 percent, say they oppose the president’s plan to create private accounts, while 39 percent say they support it, according to the poll conducted for AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs.”

USA Today (poll conducted 2/25-2/27): “A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll conducted Friday-Sunday found that 35% approved of Bush’s Social Security record, 56% disapproved and 9% had no opinion. That was down from three weeks ago, when 43% approved. In March 2001, just after he took office, 49% approved…

The poll showed that Democrats have made headway in their opposition to Bush. In early January, Americans divided evenly when asked whether Social Security needs major changes in the next year or two. Now 59% say it doesn’t need to be changed right away….

47% of Americans said they trust the Democrats more to deal with the issue of Social Security, a 10-point advantage over Republicans.

What kills me is the pretense that these numbers just mean the President needs to “educate” the American people more. He’s presented his message, and gotten killed. Maybe most people just don’t like the idea. But check out how this is being played by Republicans and the AP:

“This is the mother of all issues,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, adding that opponents of the president’s plans “are better organized than we are.”

DeLay, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and numerous other GOP lawmakers said Bush’s public campaigning has begun to show results. “People have bought into the fact that we have a problem” with Social Security’s future financing, said Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

At the same time, they said Bush has much more work ahead of him to build support for his plans for personal investment accounts as part of a bill to make Social Security solvent for the long term.

“The president will have to stay out there and lead on it, when a lot of political figures want to run and hide and when you have a lot of people who say there’s no problem,” Frist, R-Tenn., said in a shot at Democrats.

…The White House and Republican National Committee have set up an elaborate political operation to build support. But as DeLay’s comments indicated, Democrats and their allies have been quick off the mark as they accuse Bush of seeking benefit cuts to pay for privatization of Social Security.

Chuck Schumer gets it, though – here’s his quote from the same story: “‘In two months, the President has created a firestorm against’ his own plan.” Indeed.

Republicans have issued an ultimatum to the American public — you have six weeks to change your mind about private accounts… or else!

Here’s the Washington Post:

White House officials are telling Republican lawmakers and allies on K Street that they must begin to overcome opposition to President Bush’s proposal for changing Social Security within six weeks, GOP strategists said yesterday.

The GOP strategists stressed that the six-week goal is not a hard deadline for a political breakthrough, but they said the public’s tepid view of Social Security change cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Talk about elite contempt for public opinion. And you know that the President’s plan is dead in the water when the war room’s job is to track the slow-motion collapse of elite support:

The Treasury Department yesterday announced the formation of a Social Security “war room” and the hiring of three full-time employees to help coordinate and refine the administration’s message on the issue. The war room, which the administration is calling the Social Security Information Center, will track lawmakers’ remarks to their local news outlets, to help the White House detect signs of Republican concern or Democratic compromise.

The office, modeled after the Coalition Information Centers that promoted the administration message around the world during the war in Afghanistan, will also help target speaking trips by top administration officials.

They just don’t get it. Bush can’t move the numbers no matter how good a “war room” he has. The fundamental reality is that presidents can’t significantly change public opinion on domestic policy initiatives. Private accounts are going down absent some sort of face-saving compromise.

Update 3/1 Chuck Grassley is also setting arbitrary deadlines for public opinion to change or he’s jumping off the bandwagon — why does everyone think the public is going to suddenly change its mind after weeks of debate?

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said Monday that if public opinion did not soon begin to swing in favor of President Bush’s Social Security plan, it would be an indication that the plan was in trouble.

After a meeting with the other Republicans on his committee, Mr. Grassley repeated to reporters what he has been saying for weeks – that the success or failure of the plan depended on whether the president could persuade voters at the grass roots that the Social Security system was in jeopardy and that his approach was the right way to fix the problem.

…Mr. Grassley, the most important senator on Social Security policy, said that after holding 18 town meetings at home in Iowa last week, he believed that there was still “a lack of understanding” of the issue among his constituents and that if the president did not do a better job of teaching them, “nothing is going to happen.”

Right now, he said, “it’s too doggone early” to tell if Mr. Bush is making progress. Asked when that might be clearer, Mr. Grassley responded, “Maybe in another two or three weeks I would like to see some movement” in the opinion polls “or you might have some question about the president succeeding.”

There’s the understatement of the year.

The American Prospect’s Matthew Yglesias does a good job of covering some material I was planning to write up. Economic risk has become a hugely important policy issue:

RISK AND REWARD. Kevin Drum alerts us to the fact that Peter Gosselin‘s superb series on economic risk in America is now available in a convenient package. Give it a read, even if you’ve read it before. It pairs nicely with Brad DeLong‘s excerpts from today’s Wall Street Journal article, “In Bush’s ‘Ownership Society,’ Citizens Would Take More Risk.”

Putting the two together, the picture you get is this: Over the past 30 years, the American economy has become riskier for its participants. I think this is mostly a good thing, all things considered. The risk is largely a reflection of increased flexibility due to new technologies, a more competitive market dynamic, and an integrating global economy. It’s allowed us to put together a much larger economic pie than we used to have. But the higher risk is a real cost. It’s a cost that, fortunately, we can mitigate through public policy. A guarantee of a secure baseline for your retirement. A guarantee that no matter what happens, you’ll get treated if you fall ill. One could go on. Implementing these policies in a climate of increasing risk could give us a more dynamic economy overall while cushioning many of the problems it’s created.

The general direction of Bush’s plans is the reverse. Take an economic climate that’s getting riskier. Then implement a bunch of policies to make it even riskier. That’s an okay deal if your family’s got enough wealth and connections to bail you out after every failure in life, but for the average person it’s a terrible idea and there’s really no reason on earth to do it.

Let me add that Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, a leading expert who is working on a book on the subject, has articles and data on his personal website that are also worth a look.

Ann Coulter recently tried to include this sentence in her syndicated column: “Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.” And Rep. Sam Johnson recently advocated nuking Syria (though his staff denies it): “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ’em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.” Both of these comments are obvious plays on anti-Arab bigotry (obviously no one likes the Syrian regime, but nuking the country would kill millions of innocent people). President Bush did a good job of denouncing anti-Arab bigotry immediately after 9/11. The question now is whether his administration will call out Coulter and Johnson on these comments.

Howard Dean, fresh from stereotyping minorities as hotel workers, has weighed in recently with two more bits of wisdom during a visit to Kansas.

As Mickey Kaus notes (by way of Polipundit), Dean ended a speech on Friday in Lawrence, Kansas with this statement: “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” Wonderful. Pretty soon he’ll be calling George Bush “El Diablo”.

The worst part about Dean’s destructive rhetoric is that the rank and file take their cues about what’s acceptable from people like him. The local report on the Lawrence speech quotes Katherine Dessert, a “student and preschool teacher,” as demanding even more extremism. “I feel like he could have gone even stronger with his language… I feel like he was a little bit too conservative. It didn’t move me.” When preschool teachers want more red meat, you know we’re in trouble.

During a different speech in Topeka, Dean also said “I don’t believe the way to fix Social Security is to have Wall Street run it so that it can be invested in Enron and Tyco and MCI.” However, as I’ve pointed out before, Bush’s plan would not allow specific investments in individual securities. The index funds that investors could put their money represent a broad cross-section of corporations, and would not be appreciably impacted over the long term by individual corporate failures. There’s a larger issue here, of course, about the risks associated with investment in stocks, which can be quite high if you retire at the wrong time, but rather than making that argument, Dean is just throwing out tarnished corporate names to try to generate a negative association with Bush’s proposal. It’s not a reasoned argument.

Thanks Democratic National Committee!

Here’s a classic example of a bogus logical opposition from Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine:

So-called [Democratic] centrists, with precious few exceptions, have lined up with their party’s base against the idea of partly privatizing Social Security, even though those same Democrats used to argue that the program was gravely ill.

How can one of the nation’s top political writers put his name on a sentence like this? Why would there be any contradiction between expressing concern for the future of Social Security and opposing privatization? Private accounts would worsen the finances of Social Security and the federal government for decades. Even the Bush administration has admitted that they do nothing to resolve the system’s financing shortfall and require trillions in borrowing over the next several decades. Where the hell has Bai been?

Salon’s Eric Boehlert is joining the left wing blogosphere in freaking out about the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story:

On Feb. 17, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams introduced a report on controversial White House correspondent James Guckert by informing viewers that the saga was “the talk of Washington.” Nine days later the mysterious tale of an amateur, partisan journalist who slipped into the White House under false pretenses remains the buzz of the Beltway. Yet most mainstream reporters have opted not to cover the story. Two of the television networks, as well as scores of major metropolitan newspapers around the country, have completely ignored it.

Put me down with Bob Somerby on this one:

Of course, we can’t say why news orgs have behaved as they have. But why might the press have ignored this story? Could it be because it’s hopelessly trivial? In our view, the fascination with this story is another sign of the liberal web’s imperfect judgment—its tendency to confuse the wheat with the chaff, its inability to get a read on what sort of stories really matter.

Readers, why would a mainstream news org spend its time on this trivial story? Until last month, no one had ever heard of Jeff Gannon. At the time, he worked for Talon News—and no one had ever heard of them either! And except for one stupid question he posed to George Bush, Gannon-Guckert’s terrible sin was asking dumb questions of Scott McClennan, another person no one has heard of! Meanwhile, Gannon is hardly the only conservative kook asking dumb questions at McClellan’s daily sessions. For example, kooky talk host Les Kinsolving asks stupid questions in this forum every day—and no one has ever said Boo about that. It’s not clear why readers of any big paper would gives a rat’s *ss about Gannon’s behavior. Why did news orgs ignore this story? Perhaps because it simply ain’t news! Perhaps because no one in the fifty states gives a rat’s *ss about Gannon’s questions.

And Andrew Sullivan is right to point out that there has been far too much glee at the outing of Gannon/Guckert.

Can we move on to something important now? Thanks.