Brendan Nyhan

Kill me now:

CLINTON: We have a very fundamental philosophical difference with the Republicans. They believe in a society that is basically you’re on your own. And if you listen carefully to “you’re on your own,” the first letters of those words spell “yo-yo.” Think about it — somebody else is holding the string and you’re going up and you’re going down…

Is she trying to push her negatives over fifty? Ugh.

We’re heading north to see friends and family in Philly, so posting may be light through the weekend…

While Karl Rove is still touting the prospect of a GOP realignment, he seems to have finally abandoned the prospect of his white whale — a realignment election:

The Rove retrospectives that dotted the media Tuesday bashed him for his cocky past prediction that Bush would help build an enduring Republican majority. But despite the party’s current straits, believe it or not, he still stands by his belief.

“We’re not in a period where realignment is going to be achieved by a sharp, decisive election like 1896, 1932, 1800,” he said. “It’s more likely to be achieved in a series of incremental gains that prove to be durable. Notice I didn’t say ‘permanent.’”

Or, notice how Rove is still incorrectly claiming that the 1896 election was “sharp [and] decisive” (PDF, sub. req.). I guess old clichés die hard.

The New York Times article on Karl Rove’s departure today highlights his jocularity (“Rove has been a gregarious figure who … regularly used a Secret Service radio to announce his presence in presidential motorcades jokingly”), which reminds me of a classic from the archives:

Maureen Dowd highlights the maturity of the Bush White House in an anecdote drawn from Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial:

W. and Karl Rove “shared an array of fart jokes,” Mr. Woodward writes. A White House aide put a toy that made a flatulence sound under Karl’s chair for a morning meeting on July 7, 2005. When officials learned of the terrorist attacks in London that day, the prank was postponed. But several weeks later, “the device was placed under Rove’s chair and activated during the senior staff meeting. Everyone laughed.”

At least Rove can head back to Texas knowing that he and Bush restored honor and dignity to the White House…

Update 8/16:Some commenters have suggested that this may be the kind of pathological anecdote I previously denounced. It’s a fair point.

Jamison Foser of Media Matters has a useful takedown of what Time’s Jay Carney calls “the telling anecdote — the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject.” As Foser points out, the anecdotes that journalists choose to highlight are frequently untrue, misleading, irrelevant, or trivial. He suggests this rubric for reporting anecdotes:

1) Is the anecdote verifiably true?

2) Is the anecdote illustrative rather than anomalous?

3) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is verifiably true, or is it merely a convenient vehicle for suggesting something the reporter believes but cannot prove?

4) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is not only verifiably true, but is also important to understanding how the candidate would govern or how the issue would affect people? Or is it just pointless snark?

Annoyingly, however, the column also includes this passage:

Reporting by anecdote is how we got a president who doesn’t windsurf, doesn’t order the “wrong” kind of cheesesteak, doesn’t wear earth tones, doesn’t sigh, and doesn’t exaggerate* — but who does lie to the nation on the way to war, spy on Americans, torture people, threaten to veto health care for children, allow arsenic in our drinking water, politicize the Justice Department, take an à la carte approach to the Constitution… and generally behave like a despot.

The statement that Bush “allow[s] arsenic in our drinking water” is extremely misleading. First, there will always be some acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water; the question is what the standard should be. And as we pointed out at Spinsanity, the Clinton administration did not even propose changing the original 50 parts per billion standard until the end of his term, and Bush’s EPA ended up implementing the 10 parts per billion standard Clinton proposed:

President Bush never “tried to put more arsenic in the water.” The controversy began in March 2001 when the White House withdrew a regulation issued late in the Clinton administration that had not yet gone into effect. The regulation would have reduced the federal standard for arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion by 2006. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Todd Whitman stated at the time that EPA would ask expert panels to review the science and consider a standard of 3-20 parts per billion to go into effect by the original 2006 deadline. After a great deal of criticism, the EPA decided in October 2001 to issue a 10 parts per billion standard – the same as the original regulation.

At no point in the controversy did the administration propose raising the allowable limit of arsenic in drinking water above the 50 parts per billion standard that had been in effect since 1942; the controversy centered on how much to reduce that limit. Nor did the White House repeal a standard that was already being enforced; Clinton’s regulation had not yet gone into effect.

Also, contrary to Foser’s loose rhetoric about Bush’s “lies,” the President rarely says things that are completely false. Instead, as we showed in All the President’s Spin, he relies on half-truths and misleading suggestions that the media will report in a “he said,” “she said” context.

Physician, heal thyself!

One aspect of the Josh Green Atlantic article that hasn’t attracted much notice is this passage about the administration’s dysfunctional policy process, which was run by erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers:

[A]nother important misjudgment by Bush, prodded by Rove, was giving Rove too much power within the administration. This was partly a function of Rove’s desire to control policy as well as politics. His prize for winning the reelection campaign was a formal role and the title of deputy chief of staff for policy. But his power also grew because the senior policy staff in the White House was inept.

In an early scene in Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, not yet alive to the futility of his endeavor, warns Dick Cheney that the White House policy process is so ineffectual that it is tantamount to “kids rolling around on the lawn.” Had O’Neill lasted longer than he did (he resigned in 2002), he might have lowered his assessment. Before she left the White House in humiliation after conservatives blocked her nomination to the Supreme Court, White House Counsel Harriet Miers had also served as deputy chief of staff for policy. The president’s Domestic Policy Council was run by Claude Allen, until he, too, resigned, after he was caught shoplifting at Target.

The weakness of the White House policy staff demanded Rove’s constant involvement. For all his shortcomings, he had clear ideas about where the administration should go, and the ability to maneuver. “Where the bureaucracy was failing and broken, Karl got stuff done,” says a White House colleague. “Harriet was no more capable of producing policy out of the policy office she directed than you or I are capable of jumping off the roof of a building and flying to Minneapolis.”

Sounds like Supreme Court material to me!

Of course, none of this is surprising if you read Ron Suskind back in 2003:

One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. “But many of us feel it’s our duty — our obligation as Americans — to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations — mostly from Karl’s shop — to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy’s cry for help.”

…President George W. Bush called John DiIulio “one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America” when he appointed the University of Pennsylvania professor, author, historian, and domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration’s big brain, controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats, academicians and policy players. The appointment was rightfully hailed: DiIulio provided gravity to national policy debates and launched the most innovative of President Bush’s campaign ideas — the faith-based initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four months from Philadelphia.

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.”

Josh Green’s fascinating Atlantic Monthly article on Karl Rove highlights the outgoing presidential adviser’s obsession with creating an electoral realignment. But as Matthew Yglesias points out, realignment theory is an antiquated approach that is no longer taken seriously in modern political science:

I will, however, note that what I found most fascinating about it was Josh’s evidence that Rove’s talk of masterminding an electoral realignment wasn’t just bluster, but played an actual causal role in his thinking about the administration’s political and policy choices. Maybe, then, Rove will be able to take advantage of his new, more relaxed schedule, to sit down and digest David Mayhew’s Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre which argues convincingly that so-called realignments are a product of statistical naivete and the human penchant for hyperactive pattern detection rather than a real phenomenon of American politics.

Indeed, Green (an acquaintance of mine from when I lived in Washington) is arguably too respectful of realignment theory in this passage, especially given that he cites Mayhew’s book later in the article:

Fifty years ago, political scientists developed what is known as realignment theory—the idea that a handful of elections in the nation’s history mattered more than the others because they created “sharp and durable” changes in the polity that lasted for decades. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, which brought on the New Deal and three decades of Democratic dominance in Washington, is often held up as the classic example. Modern American historians generally see five elections as realigning: 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s victory all but finished off the Federalist Party and reoriented power from the North to the agrarian South; 1828, when Andrew Jackson’s victory gave rise to the modern two-party system and two decades of Jacksonian influence; 1860, when Abraham Lincoln’s election marked the ascendance of the Republican Party and of the secessionist impulse that led to the Civil War; 1896, when the effects of industrialization affirmed an increasingly urban political order that brought William McKinley to power; and Roosevelt’s election in 1932, during the Great Depression.

Academics debate many aspects of this theory, such as whether realignment comes in regular cycles, and whether it is driven by voter intensity or disillusionment. But historians have shown that two major preconditions typically must be in place for realignment to occur. First, party loyalty must be sufficiently weak to allow for a major shift—the electorate, as the political scientist Paul Allen Beck has put it, must be “ripe for realignment.” The other condition is that the nation must undergo some sort of triggering event, often what Beck calls a “societal trauma”—the ravaging depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, for instance, or the North-South conflict of the 1850s and ’60s that ended in civil war. It’s important to have both. Depressions and wars throughout American history have had no realigning consequence because the electorate wasn’t primed for one, just as periods of electoral unrest have passed without a realignment for lack of a catalyzing event.

Actually, the debate over realignment among political scientists is essentially over, and historians haven’t “shown” anything.

For instance, the most recent examination of the supposedly critical 1896 election — the key to Rove’s theory of politics and the model for Bush — finds no indication of a discontinuous break from the past (PDF, sub. req.):

There is no evidence of a significant
shift in 1896 in the national vote for Democratic presidential and
House candidates. There is no evidence that there was an abrupt
decline in support for Democrats in House districts with higher density and higher percentages of the foreign born. The evidence about
the coalition strategy of Democrats and the general terms of political
discourse, although by no means exhaustive, indicates more continuity pre–1896 and post–1896 than change.

In the conclusion to the journal article that led to his book (sub. req.), Mayhew sums up the problems with the realignment literature:

The claims of the realignments genre do not hold up well, and the genre’s illuminative power has not proven to be great. At an analytic level, the genre has proven vulnerable to at least three counterposing ideas: contingency, strategy, and valence issues.

Electoral politics is strongly influenced by the contingencies of unfolding events. To the extent that this is true, elections and their underlying causes are not usefully sortable into generation-long spans. Furthermore, victory-oriented strategy is plied by candidates and parties, both of which tend to cater to the electorate as well as emanate from it… To the degree that parties and candidates seek election victories above all else, courting the median voter, they will often accommodate major impulses from the electorate without telltale signs of realignment appearing in elections. Thus, the size of voter realignments cannot index the importance, innovativeness, and consequentiality of elections, nor the level of voter concern that underpins them.

If we consider the combination of contingency and victory-oriented strategy, certain results reported by Gans (1985) become understandable. In the sequence of presidential elections from 1856 through 1980, the distribution of victory “runs” by party (Carter, for example, was a run of one for the Democrats; Reagan’s two victories and Bush’s one made a run of three for the Republicans) did not differ significantly from the runs of heads and tails that would be expected from coin flips (Gans 1985:228–30). Also, in the absence of repeat major-party candidates (such as Reagan in 1984 or Bryan in 1900), a presidential election four years ago holds virtually zero predictive value for this year’s election—either in predicting this year’s victorious party or this year’s party shares of the vote (Gans 1985:230–33).

The third idea that poses problems for the realignments genre is that of valence issues. The concept was introduced by Stokes (1966) and given major play, at least implicitly, in the sizable econometrics literature gauging the effects of ups and downs in the economy on elections. Unlike position issues, in which one party favors policy X and the other party favors policy Y—the staple kind of cleavage in the realignments genre—valence issues hinge chiefly on government management. Can another party manage the economy or the war, for example, better than the incumbent party has been doing? The more one examines American electoral history, the more it seems to tilt toward valence-issue as opposed to position-issue junctures. More than it did a generation ago, for example, the electoral turmoil of the 1890s seems to implicate the depression of 1893 as much as Bryan’s insurgency. A poor economy figured in the critical 1874 midterm, and, according to one recent analysis, a quick nationwide economic downturn was a central ingredient in the Whigs’ great victory of 1840 (Holt 1985). Valence issues, which also exemplify contingency and often bring into play opportunistic candidate or party strategies, are not friendly territory for the realignments genre.

The moral of the story is that Rove spent too much time talking to and reading historians and not enough time with political scientists. It’s not hard to figure out why: historians tell stories, and humans love stories. Indeed, as Yglesias notes above and in a followup post, we’re apt to see patterns in (possible) randomness. That’s why we need quantitative political science to sort out the stories that are backed by evidence from the ones that are not. Unfortunately, most people don’t enjoy reading quantitative academic research, especially if they don’t have a strong background in math and statistics, so consultants and journalists tend to ignore our work and read the David McCulloughs of the world instead.

The AP’s Ron Fournier examines Democratic worries about having Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket in 2008:

Looking past the presidential nomination fight, Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom.

They say the former first lady may be too polarizing for much of the country. She could jeopardize the party’s standing with independent voters and give Republicans who otherwise might stay home on Election Day a reason to vote, they worry.

In more than 40 interviews, Democratic candidates, consultants and party chairs from every region pointed to internal polls that give Clinton strikingly high unfavorable ratings in places with key congressional and state races.

Not to worry, say Clinton pollster Mark Penn, who makes the implausible claim that her unfavorable numbers will go down during the general election campaign:

The Clinton campaign points to those figures to make a case for her electability in a constant stream of e-mails, letters and phone calls to jittery Democrats across the country. A key to their strategy is to give Clinton’s candidacy a sense of inevitability despite her negative ratings, which aides insist will go down.

“All the negatives on her are out,” said Clinton’s pollster and strategist Mark Penn. “There is a phenomena with Hillary, because she is the front-runner and because she’s been battling Republicans for so long, her unfavorability (rating) looks higher than what they will eventually be after the nomination and through the general election.”

However, Fournier points out that candidates’ unfavorables almost never go down:

What the Clinton campaign doesn’t say is that her edge over potential Republican candidates is much smaller than it should be, given the wide lead the Democratic Party holds over the GOP in generic polling.

The problem is her political baggage: A whopping 49 percent of the public says they have an unfavorable view of Clinton compared to 47 percent who say they hold her in high regard, according to a Gallup Poll survey Aug. 3-5.

Her negative ratings are higher than those of her husband, former President Clinton, former President George H.W. Bush and 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry at the end of their campaigns.

A candidate’s unfavorability scores almost always climb during campaigns. If the pattern holds, Clinton has a historically high hurdle to overcome.

It is true that Democrats who currently say they have an unfavorable view of Hillary may rally to her side. But on the other hand, many other people may be reminded why they didn’t like her in the first place. Remember, she’s had unfavorables in the 40s since 1994 (with the exception of the period in the late 1990s in which Bill Clinton’s scandals made her a more sympathetic figure). Why would we expect the public to view her more favorably after she’s endlessly savaged by both her primary opponents and Republicans?

As I wrote before, she is a weak candidate. She could be carried to victory by a favorable political environment, but it’s hard to imagine her being anything but a drag on her party. (See my previous posts on Hillary for more.)

During a debate with DLC chairman Harold Ford Jr. on Meet the Press this morning, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas made this fallacious argument for why candidates for their party should act like “proud Democrats”:

MR. MOULITSAS: No, no, no. You’re talking about bringing the, you know, appealing to the vast majority of the American public. Bill Clinton never one with 50 percent plus one of the votes.

REP. FORD: But he was president twice. I’ll take his record any day of the week.

MR. MOULITSAS: The most, the most talented—the most talented politician of our era, incredible political talent, wasn’t able to beat—to win 50 percent of the American vote. Now, last year in 2006, running as strong unapologetic muscular Democrats, Democrats brought in 56 percent of the vote. We are appealing to the mainstream. We brought in independents in droves, and it wasn’t just George Bush.

In short, Moulitsas is claiming that being “strong unapologetic muscular Democrats” outperforms Clinton’s DLC-style triangulation at the polls. But his evidence is nonsense. Clinton never received fifty percent of the popular vote because Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate in 1992 and 1996. Democratic Congressional candidates didn’t face a major third party challenge in 2006. It’s apples and oranges.

Moreover, even if the comparison were valid, causality often runs the other direction — candidates are more likely to run as strong partisans in favorable political environments and to move toward the center in unfavorable environments. For instance, the results of the 1994 election were obviously part of the reason that Clinton tacked toward the center. So we can’t conclude much of anything from observing that “strong” Democrats do better than triangulators.

Evidence is beside the point anyway. This is ideological agitprop — just like the absurd claim that Republicans lost in 2006 because they were insufficiently conservative.

Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader, recently suggested that President Bush is “letting Osama bin Laden roam free”:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, issued a statement criticizing Mr. Bush’s agenda.

“Whether it is privatizing Social Security, giving massive tax breaks to oil companies while consumers pay more at the pump or letting Osama bin Laden roam free while we keep our troops mired in an open-ended Iraqi civil war, America has had just about enough of President Bush’s misguided priorities,” Mr. Reid said.

Of course, there’s no evidence that Bush has allowed bin Laden to evade capture.

Note how Reid imputes motive to Bush’s failure to capture bin Laden. This is a direct reversal of the conservative tactic of suggesting that we have failed to win the war in Iraq because Democrats want us to lose.

(See the conclusion to All the President’s Spin for more on how liberals are increasingly adopting the tactics of conservatives.)