Brendan Nyhan

Sean Hannity, June 18, 2009 (via Media Matters):

CAROLINE HELDEN, PROFESSOR, OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE: [President Obama] inherited a terrible political and economic situation from the previous administration.

HANNITY: Blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to hear this anymore.

HELDEN: He had incredibly high approval ratings, Kennedy-esque approval ratings, and now they’re starting to come back to earth. They’re still very high for a president with these economic woes.

HANNITY: Let me ask this. This is not Bush’s problem. It’s his quadrupling of the deficit. He made those choices. He took over G.M., the financial institutions. He wants to nationalize health care. This is Obama’s economy now…

Sean Hannity, August 17, 2001: “[T]his is still the Clinton economy, in case you forgot.”

Sean Hannity, August 20, 2001: “[W]e have the Clinton economy, the Clinton slowdown… We are living under the Clinton economy, and the slowdown that started in the spring of 2000.”

Sean Hannity, August 21, 2001: “This is the Clinton economy slowed down.”

Sean Hannity, August 22, 2001: “[T]his is Clinton’s budget, Clinton’s economy… the slowdown began last July.”

Sean Hannity, September 5, 2001: “[Y]ou’re back to the old tactics of scaring the old people of this country, trying to blame Republicans for the Clinton economy…”

During a “conversation” with David Brooks on nytimes.com, Times columnist Gail Collins kicked things off by describing Brooks as “the go-to guy on how America lives.” Noooooooo!

Michael Bérubé, who flagged this gem, offers the only appropriate response:

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation.  But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first.  Once I regained the will to live…

Déjà vu alert: Betsy McCaughey is pushing misinformation about health care legislation in Congress again.

Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had read the entire 1300+ page bill and discovered this coercive requirement, but she failed to mention the provision stating that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting … [a]n individual from purchasing any health care services.” (Incredibly, her article won a National Magazine Award and she went on to become lieutenant governor of New York.)

It’s hard to understate the damage that McCaughey’s article inflicted on the Clinton health care plan. The next week, former TNR editor Michael Kinsley slammed McCaughey’s piece in his own column in the magazine, and subsequent reporting by James Fallows and Mickey Kaus showed it to be riddled with a number of false and misleading claims. By then, however, her claims had been repeated and disseminated throughout the national media. Hendrik Hertzberg, a former TNR editor now at The New Yorker, told me in previous reporting that “No Exit” was “the low point in the magazine’s history since it stopped being sympathetic to the Soviet Union” and Fallows recently nominated her for “Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person” during the 1990s.

For all of these reasons, it’s disturbing to see McCaughey being given airtime on CNBC to promote new misinformation about the Democratic health care plan being developed in Congress. In this case, as Media Matters reports, she’s falsely claiming that “the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans.” And again, she’s using the gimmick of pushing strained interpretations of specific provisions in the legislation (“That’s Section 3101”) while ignoring other provisions that directly undercut her arguments (“No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway”).

Earlier this year, McCaughey tried the same close-reading gimmick with the stimulus bill, falsely claiming to have discovered that it will create “[a] new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology [that] will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective,” leading to “rationing” for seniors.

How many times will we let McCaughey get away with this? It’s time to cast her out of public discourse and shame anyone who gives attention to her claims.

Update 6/19 9:40 AM: McCaughey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same false claim. Under the Kennedy bill, she writes, “you must enroll in a ‘qualified’ plan or face a fine even if you and your employer are paying the entire cost of the plan you already have (section 161).” Again, the provision described above, which states that “No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway,” is omitted. As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn writes, “She has forfeited the right to be taken seriously, particularly when it comes to health care.”

Back in 2002 or so, it would have been hard to imagine that Josh Marshall would be posting pictures of the house of the GOP staffer who had an affair with Republican senator John Ensign under the headline “Chez Hampton: Swank Vegas Digs of Former Ensign Love Triangle Staffers.” (A later post added reader comments mocking the design of the house as “mafia chic.”) It’s yet another reminder of how Marshall’s Talking Points Memo website has grown by moving downmarket.

(Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign’s opponent, Ed Bernstein.)

We’re just getting started on the health care debate, and political journalists’ lack of substantive knowledge and devotion to “he said”/”she said” reporting is already resulting in misleading coverage:

-Media Matters flags a Politico story that quotes Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) saying “‘Washington takeover’ are two words we’ve been hearing a lot from the Obama Administration these days” without pointing out that the phrase has not been used by the White House — it’s actually a poll-tested GOP catchphrase.

-ABC reporter Byron Wolf repeated a misleading Republican talking point as fact in describing John McCain’s criticism of a Democratic bill:

McCain pointed to a nonpartisan [Congressional Budget Office] cost estimate of $1 trillion over ten years for the major portion of healthcare reform suggested in a bill floated by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Health Committee and said the cost was too high for American taxpayers, especially since the nonpartisan review foresaw 23 million would lose their current insurance plans under the proposal.

in fact, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out in criticizing a similar claim by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, the Congressional Budget Office report (PDF) did not state that 23 million would “lose their current insurance plans.” CBO found that “15 million fewer” people “would be covered by an employment-based health plan” but 10 million of those would be choosing a subsidized plan from an insurance exchange over employment-based coverage. (The additional estimated decline of eight million people would be the result of shifts from Medicaid, CHIP, and nongroup coverage to the insurance exchanges — not lost coverage.)

-Media outlets like the New York Times are covering the CBO report without explaining why the bill was found to be relatively ineffective at expanding coverage:

The rush to trim costs came as Senate Democrats and the White House struggled to respond to an initial financial analysis by the budget office showing that an alternate proposal, developed by the Senate health committee, would cost $1 trillion over 10 years but could still leave 36 million Americans uninsured.

The analysis by the nonpartisan budget office showed Democrats falling far short of their goal, which is to provide insurance to all Americans and offset the expense of doing so with new taxes or cost savings. Republicans quickly seized on the figures to charge that the Democrats’ efforts would fail.

The Democrats aren’t “falling far short of their goal” — they didn’t try to get there in the bill that the CBO analyzed. Ezra Klein provides the context that’s missing from the Times report:

A couple of months ago, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee sent the CBO a sketch of a draft of its legislation. And the CBO sent the members back a stab at an outline of an estimate. It was all very early, and very rough. But CBO’s response was encouraging. The total cost was a bit higher, but the number covered was much higher. More like what you’d expect. More like what health reform is trying to achieve.

The draft the CBO examined last week, however, was in certain respects even less complete than the outline they were given months ago. In an effort to buy some extra time to negotiate with Republicans on the committee, the Democrats on HELP left out some of the more controversial policies in the hopes of reaching a bipartisan agreement sometime this week. The public plan, the employer mandate and the individual mandate were all absent from the proposal the CBO examined. The employer and individual mandates — the first of which pushes employers to offer coverage and the second of which force individuals to purchase coverage — are particularly key to increasing the number of Americans with health insurance.

You might ask what the HELP Committee was thinking, sending Swiss cheese legislation to CBO. Well, the HELP Committee’s expectation was that the CBO, in crafting its preliminary score, would assume something similar to the outline it had seen months before. The CBO didn’t. In fact, it did the opposite. CBO ran its estimates with no employer mandate and an individual mandate with a laughably small penalty.

Members of HELP were thus shocked by yesterday’s score. The specific provisions of the bill that the CBO examined did not look like the bill HELP intends to write. Which means that the numbers aren’t correct. If HELP is writing a bill with a strong employer and individual mandate, and CBO scores a bill with no employer mandate and a weak individual mandate, that’s not a useful estimate.

By Monday night, members of the HELP Committee were scrambling to give the CBO something closer to the final legislation to examine — this time including rough details of the employer mandate and the individual mandate. They’re hoping to have a new set of estimates by Friday, though that’s probably ambitious. Either way, I wouldn’t put too much stock in these numbers.

There’s just no way to responsibly report on the CBO analysis without making clear that three key Democratic policy provisions (public plan, employer mandate and individual mandate) were excluded (update: actually four). And yet many outlets have done so. It’s not an encouraging sign.

From a Paul Krugman blog post about a new model he’s working on:

In his new book The Myth of the Rational Market Justin Fox traces the lineage of the noise-trade assumption to an unpublished paper by Larry Summers that began, THERE ARE IDIOTS.

It was wrong for Republicans to say Democrats hoped the nation would lose the war in Iraq under President Bush, and it’s wrong for CIA director Leon Panetta to mind-read Dick Cheney as wishing for a terrorist attack under President Obama:

The Central Intelligence Agency typically fights distant enemies, but on May 21st its leaders were preoccupied with a local opponent. A few miles from the agency’s headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration’s emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making “the American people less safe” by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations “is unwise in the extreme,” Cheney charged. “It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

Leon Panetta, the C.I.A.’s new director—and the man who bears much of the responsibility for keeping the country safe—learned the details of Cheney’s speech when he arrived in his office, on the seventh floor of the agency’s headquarters. An hour earlier, he had been standing at the side of President Barack Obama, who was giving a speech at the National Archives, in which he argued that America could “fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law.” In January, the Obama Administration banned the “enhanced” techniques that the Bush Administration had Wapproved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney’s speech with surprising candor. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

Despite the weasel word “almost,” Panetta is clearly suggesting that Cheney wants the country to be attacked. It’s a vicious smear that was immediately endorsed by Josh Marshall, who wrote a post titled “Not ‘Almost’” that begins with the line “It’s about time someone said it.”

The problem, of course, is that Cheney has never stated that he “wish[ed] that this country would be attacked again” — the reason that Panetta resorts to mind-reading. The best Think Progress could do in a post supporting Panetta’s accusation is to quote Cheney stating that Obama is “making some choices” that “raise the risk… of another attack.” Cheney may be right or he may be wrong about the consequences of Obama’s policy choices, but he has every right to express concern about the risk of another attack without being smeared as “wishing” that one will take place.

Update 6/15 1:46 PM: Pot/kettle alert — Marshall’s site criticized John McCain’s campaign for suggesting Democrats want the US to lose in Iraq.

Update 6/16 11:37 AM: Panetta’s spokesman is trying to walk back what his boss said:

“The Director does not believe the former Vice President wants an attack,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said in a statement to CNN. “He did not say that. He was simply expressing his profound disagreement with the assertion that President Obama’s security policies have made our country less safe. Nor did he question anyone’s motives.”

Fox is known for its use of loaded and/or wacky polling questions, but the latest one is just bizarre — they polled on whether people think President Obama is “sneaking cigarettes at the White House” (PDF):

53. Barack Obama says he quit smoking cigarettes. Do you think Obama is still
sneaking cigarettes at the White House or do you think he has completely quit
smoking?

	Still sneaking	Completely quit	Don’t know
Overall	37%	30	33
Democrats	37%	37	26
Republicans	38%	27	35
Independents	38%	25	36

The public has no idea what Obama is doing in private at the White House. So why should we care what they think he’s doing? I’m guessing the intent here is to suggest that Obama’s stand on the tobacco regulation legislation is hypocritical (though it’s hard to say because the Fox release doesn’t include the questions asked immediately before the one above). If so, I’m not sure why public opinion on him sneaking cigarettes would be relevant to that (silly) claim. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense — the Foxnews.com report on the poll just presents it as a total non sequitur.

A number of elites have recently claimed that President Obama needs Republican support in order to ensure that his proposed health care reforms are sustainable:

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR): “The president is very much aware that to bring about enduring change — health care reform that lasts, gets implemented, wins the support of the American people and does not get repealed in a couple of years — you need bipartisan support.”

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT): “Baucus remains determined to send to the floor a bill with bipartisan support; passing health care reform by reconciliation [which requires only fifty votes in the Senate], he says, would make the new law unsustainable in the long term.”

Washington Post columnist David Broder: “The goal of the Obama White House is to come up with a health-care plan that can attract bipartisan support. The president has told visitors that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes 52 to 48.

“There is good reason for that preference. When you are changing the way one-sixth of the American economy is organized and altering life for patients, doctors, hospitals and insurers, you need that kind of a strong launch if the result is to survive the inevitable vagaries of the shakedown period.”

Is this view correct? Are policies that pass with bipartisan support more sustainable?

It turns out that the political scientists Forrest Maltzman and Charles Shipan investigated the sustainability of major legislation in a recent American Journal of Political Science article (PDF). Their results contain both good news and bad news for Obama if his goal is to pass a bill that is durable over time.

The good news for Obama, who enjoys a relatively cohesive majority in both chambers of Congress, is that legislation that is enacted under unified government is less likely to be significantly amended over time. The risk of amendment is also lower as House/Senate disagreement declines. (Maltzman and Shipan argue that these factors make it possible to craft more cohesive policies and to entrench them against future changes.)

The bad news is that bills that are more complex (as proxied by their length) and bills that pass with relatively narrow majorities are more likely to be amended. The enacting legislation for Obama’s plan is likely to be long and complex and to pass on a relatively close vote in the Senate.

With that said, however, the Maltzman and Shipan results are not fully definitive on this question. Their measure of “divisiveness,” which is the percentage of legislators voting yes in the closer of the House and Senate final passage votes, does not distinguish between majority party size and minority party support. As a result, bipartisanship could vary substantially for a given level of divisiveness. For instance, obtaining sixty votes in the Senate means something different now (when the Democrats hold 59 seats) than it did in early 2001 (when the Republicans held 50).* It’s therefore hard to say how much Republican votes should matter to Obama.

More generally, there’s an important ambiguity about the causal mechanism in the claims quoted above that also comes up in Maltzman and Shipan’s discussion of the “divisiveness” hypothesis. Are policies enacted with bipartisan support more durable for political reasons (i.e. it will take more votes in the future to amend the bill) or substantive ones (i.e. the compromises required to obtain bipartisan support reduce minority party efforts to pursue future amendments)? It seems like an important question but one that’s hard to disentangle empirically.

As such, the implications for Obama are again somewhat unclear, especially given the extent of the Democratic majority in Congress. Obtaining more than a few GOP votes is likely to require painful concessions — will those compromises provide enough durability benefits to justify their policy costs? As Ezra Klein asks, “how many Republican votes are worth sacrificing a policy [the so-called “public option”] that would lower the cost of health insurance by between 20 percent and 30 percent a year”?

(* Matthew Yglesias independently posted an item this afternoon making a similar point about the changing definition of bipartisanship.)

Update 6/12 12:14 PM: Yglesias argues that, in his view, “[s]peculative ideas about stability” don’t justify major policy concessions. He also notes that Baucus is reportedly targeting as many as 70 votes in the Senate for the health care bill and may dump the public option to try to get there. Still, I doubt that will be enough to attract so many Senate Republicans — 70 votes for health care is likely to prove as unattainable as Obama’s alleged 80-vote goal on the stimulus bill.

Update 6/20 2:06 PM: I got in touch with Shipan, who conducted a preliminary re-analysis of his data and found that the number of minority votes against a bill was not statistically significant (unlike their divisiveness measure).

The perverse consequences of judicial elections mount.

The Supreme Court has ruled that “[e]lected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench.”

That may not sound so bad, but the decision appears to create an ill-defined standard of “disproportionate influence” that could actually encourage further meddling in judicial elections:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”

Monday’s decision concerned an extreme case, and it announced a vague and general standard that will be refined and applied in the lower courts. The justices in the majority said they did not intend “unnecessary interference with judicial elections.”

But the four dissenting justices predicted that the decision would generate a flood of groundless recusal motions and undermine confidence in the judiciary.

As I wrote back in February, such a standard could have a host of unintended consequences:

[A] ruling that judges have to recuse themselves in such cases could have the perverse effect of drawing more money into the system. Attorneys, companies, and individuals might choose to make large contributions as an insurance policy so that they would have a basis to demand recusals by ideologically hostile judges in future court cases.

Imagine that you are a business or individual want to influence a state supreme court and you have large amounts of money at your disposal. This ruling may prevent you from directly obtaining favorable rulings from justices you help elect in cases to which you are a party. But you can still help put someone on the court who is ideologically sympathetic to your beliefs. And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

(Unfortunately, there’s no good solution to these problems other than eliminating judicial elections, which is generally impossible as a political matter.)