Brendan Nyhan

It’s rare to see a major columnist offer an admission of error (see Dowd, Maureen), so let’s give credit where credit is due. As I wrote on Spinsanity, David Brooks was one of several columnists peddling the claim had endorsed the “outsourcing” of combat operations in Tora Bora to Afghan troops in 2001, only to change his views on the matter during the campaign. But the quote in question was bogus, and today Brooks admits it:

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.

Writing on OpinionJournal.com, Daniel Henninger bemoans the lack of trust in the media, and proposes a solution:

The real winners here are the politicians. Pig heaven for them. If much of the public (a margin large enough to decide elections) believes it no longer has access to a settled information baseline, an agreed-upon set of facts, then it’s so much easier for the pols, using this new arsenal of high-tech info firepower, to manipulate a doubtful public and push it around with propaganda (they can demographically target ads to the TV screens in health clubs).

Here’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem. Why don’t we finally institute an American version of the parliamentary question period common around the U.K.? If the likes of Messrs. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Snow, Cheney and Bush had to appear before the House in this tightly regulated question-and-answer format, broadcast on C-Span, surely the public over time would acquire a clearer sense of which ideas are competing for their support and vote. Let’s get to them, before they get to us.

Question Time is great, but there’s unfortunately no way to compel the executive branch to submit itself to brutal questioning from the legislative branch, particularly Bush or Cheney. Damn separation of powers! (Just kidding.) And remember, the administration doesn’t even hold press conferences except on very rare occasions. Still, it’s good to see Henninger recognize the need for an agreed-upon information baseline for voters and aggressive, credible questioning of government.

There’s nothing more depressing than people accusing the other side of Orwellian tactics while they do the same thing. Katrina vanden Heuvel says Republicans twist the meaning of language, then offers a “dictionary” of definitions for what the GOP actually means when it uses various words. Obviously it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s full of crap like this: “FAITH, n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary.”

During a lunch with reporters this week, Karl Rove hit the nail on the head:

“Would our system have been better off if the 527s had not been players? I think so,” he said at a lunch with reporters. “I’m a fervent believer in strong parties, and things that weaken the parties and place the outcomes of elections in the hands of billionaires who can write checks and political consultants who can get themselves hired by billionaires who can write checks gives me some concern.”

I said it before, I’ll say it again. Campaign finance reform weakens parties, which makes it harder for voters to hold politicians accountable for their actions and diverts money into 527s that can’t be held electorally accountable for dirty politics. There’s too much at stake in elections to expect rich people to not spend money to try to influence them, and the First Amendment means we can’t (and shouldn’t) ban them from doing so. We need to lift the restrictions on donations. Let voters make up their own minds about where the money is coming from.

And the need for non-partisan Iowa-style state redistricting commissions to draw competitive districts is even more profound after Tuesday’s results. Here’s David Broder back on the case:

The Supreme Court has ordered a lower court to rehear the Texas redistricting case, but unless it someday decides to curb partisan gerrymandering, the makeup of the House is almost immune to change. Thanks to rigged boundaries and the incumbents’ immense fundraising advantage, nearly 96 percent of the “races” were won by a margin of at least 10 percent. Richie noted that 29 of the 33 open seats (with no incumbents running) stayed with the same party. The turnout of voters was about 50 percent higher than in off-year 2002, but party ratios in the House barely budged.

At the founding of this republic, House members were given the shortest terms — half the length of the president’s, one-third that of senators — to ensure that they would be sensitive to any shifts in public opinion. Now they have more job security than the queen of England — and as little need to seek their subjects’ assent.

Those results are a democratic disgrace. Even Instapundit is ready to get behind a reform effort. Get Iowa fever!

Update: The Wall Street Journal also has the fever:

Of the seven incumbents who lost this year, four were Texas Democrats who went down because their districts were redrawn by Republicans. (The three others were a Democrat in Indiana and a Republican in Illinois and in Georgia.) Currently, the redistricting racket favors the GOP. But it hurt the party for years before 1994 and eventually it will again. In any case, the dearth of competitive House races is bad for the country because it makes for less accountable politicians.

In more than 150 House races, the winner garnered at least 60% of the vote. More than 75 others — double the number of competitive races — were certifiable landslides, with the winner grabbing 70% or higher. Those types of results scare off potential challengers. Over in the Senate, by contrast, 11 of 34 contests were won with 55% of the vote or less, and two others by 56%. The politicians haven’t found a way to gerrymander an entire state. Yet.

If Republicans are now opportunistically using their majorities to reverse Democratic gerrymanders, then good-governance liberals aren’t helping by making money their reform holy grail. While the politicians have built safe seats — and the Supreme Court has blocked responses such as term limits — John McCain and his friends on the left have peddled campaign finance reform as the panacea. But if they really care about making elections more competitive, they’ll drop the fool’s errand of trying to separate money from politics and instead push initiatives that would turn redistricting over to nonpartisan panels, as in Iowa and Washington state.

A good place to start is California, which has 53 House seats, 12% of the entire nation’s, yet not one of them switched parties last week. In 51 of those races, the winner received at least 60% of the vote. Nor is the entrenchment limited to Congress. “In all 100 state Assembly and Senate races,” reports the Sacramento Bee, “the winner was either the incumbent or a candidate from the incumbent’s party.”

California’s districts are indeed a scandal. And they make a great point about campaign finance reform, which is often used as an incumbent protection racket. If it is easier for challengers to raise money, we’ll have more competitive elections, and that’s a good thing.

Good for the media for finally going to work on all the ridiculous election-stealing stories. Here’s are a few of the good ones I’ve seen:
–Slate
–Salon
–LA Times
–Wired News
–ABC News
–Washington Post

Even The Nation has joined the growing chorus of debunkers, though David Corn soft-pedals his criticism for obvious reasons given the magazine’s readership.

Bryan Faler at the Washington Post runs more numbers from the mandate beat:

Bush’s unofficial three-percentage-point margin of victory, for example, was the fifth smallest since 1920. John F. Kennedy won in 1960 with 0.2 percent more votes than Richard M. Nixon. Nixon, in turn, won in 1968 with a slim 0.7 percent advantage over Hubert H. Humphrey. In 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald R. Ford by 2.1 percent. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral one. Conversely, 10 of the previous 21 presidential races were won by at least 10 percentage points — and five of them were decided by more than 20 points.

Bush’s chunk of the popular vote — unofficially, 51 percent — also places him in the middle of this historical pack. Thirteen of the winners of the previous 21 elections won a larger share of the vote. Lyndon B. Johnson won the highest percentage, when he swamped Barry Goldwater in 1964 with 61.1 percent. Bill Clinton won with the lowest, when he took 43 percent in 1992. Bush, however, is the first to win a majority of the popular vote since 1988.

As I wrote a few days ago, Faler is right that Bush’s victory certainly doesn’t compare with supposed “mandate” elections of the past, but that may not matter. On NPR tonight, I heard Mara Liasson says Bush will “begin to enact” his second-term agenda — phrasing that ignores Congress and assumes he will be successful — and the liberal folks at Media Matters have tracked a bunch of reporters explicitly saying Bush has a mandate over the last week. If enough people buy into the idea, well, then it’s a “mandate” regardless of what happened on Election Day.

Who writes something like this? Melissa Ruley in this week’s edition of Durham’s own Independent Weekly (via Best of the Web):

I find it easier to explain the psychology of a suicide bomber than how it is that most Americans like Bush, think he’s taking the right course.

I don’t know what’s worse — the obscene moral relativism of the comparison or the utter condescension toward Bush voters.

Here’s Richard Cohen in yesterday’s Washington Post:

And tell me, is there anyone out there who thought you could narrow the deficit and fund all sorts of programs merely by eliminating the tax breaks President Bush gave the very rich — people who make more than $200,000 a year? I voted for Kerry, but I didn’t believe that for a second.

Huh? Kerry exaggerated how much revenue his tax proposals would bring in, but even Bush said Kerry’s plan would have generated $650 billion over ten years. That’s not chump change.

If you liked the purple map, check out Morris Fiorina’s Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, which I was reminded of this morning by Robert Samuelson. It’s a useful corrective to the red vs. blue hysteria that has gripped the country. We are divided in many ways, but Fiorina, an eminent political scientist, reminds us that “the great mass of the American people… are for the most part moderate in their views and tolerant in their manner.” Check it out — the first chapter is available online in PDF format.

Kevin Drum points out an interesting difference between Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 and Clinton’s re-election bid in 1996:

[I]n 1996, of the people who thought the economy was in good shape, a total of about 63% voted for Clinton. In 2004, of the people who thought the economy was in good shape, an astonishing total of about 87% voted for Bush.

That’s a huge difference, and what it shows is that George Bush was much more successful at taking credit for the economy than Clinton was — and Clinton was no slouch in that department. As a result, although fewer people in 2004 thought the economy was doing well compared to 1996, Bush got far more total votes from that group than Clinton did.

There’s another way to interpret these figures, however. One key difference between the two races is that the state of the economy was a much more partisan issue in this campaign than 1996. Back then, Bob Dole was forced to run a character-focused campaign because he clearly couldn’t win on the economy, so Republicans and Democrats didn’t polarize as much in their opinions of how well it was doing. The 1996 exit poll shows that 55% of Americans thought the economy was good or excellent, including 42% of Dole voters and 70% of Clinton voters (a 28% gap). Only 10% of Dole voters thought the economy was in poor shape, compared with 4% of Clinton voters (a 6% difference).

In 2004, however, perceptions of the country’s economic well-being became a Rorschach blot, with both sides tossing out cherry-picked statistics to support the preconceptions of their supporters. According to the exit poll, 47% of Americans thought the economy was good or excellent, but that figure masks a huge divide between Bush and Kerry supporters. 13% of Kerry voters thought the economy was good or excellent, compared with 80% of Bush voters — an astonishing 67% gap that more than doubles the difference in 1996. 33% of Kerry voters thought the economy was in poor shape, compared with 2% of Bush voters — a 31% difference that is more than five times as great as the one in 1996. With that kind of polarization, it’s not surprising that the relationship between thinking the economy was good and supporting the incumbent was much tighter this time.

Update: Just to clarify, there are two different conceptual possibilities. One is that the economy drives vote choice (ie it’s an exogenous causal factor). The other is that vote choice drives perceptions of the economy (ie it’s endogenous). Obviously, both factors are important, but my suspicion is that the latter is more important in explaining the difference between 1996 and 2004. In short, people follow cues from elites, and this time the messages they received about the state of the economy differed wildly.