Brendan Nyhan

Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza is floating another silly up-is-down argument about how President Obama would benefit from Republican control of Congress:

How would the health care fight have played out differently if Republicans were in control of the House?

It’s impossible — though fascinating — to game out what might have happened but what’s clear is that there would be a significant higher bar for Republicans to not only provide alternative proposals but also to work with the President to try to find common ground.

And, if they didn’t, Obama could easily use the GOP as a foil — a symbol of everything that’s wrong with government and why it’s not working for the American people.

One needs only look back to the last time a Democrat occupied the White House to see the potential political efficacy of such a strategy.

Bill Clinton came into office in 1992 with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate but his presidency foundered in the first two years due to a number of factors not the least of which was his inability to pass his own health care bill.

The Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 election gave Clinton an enemy in the form of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.). Clinton played off of Gingrich masterfully — never more apparent than in the government shutdown of late 1995 — and found ways to work with the Republican-led House on initiatives (welfare reform being the most obvious) that cast him as a bipartisan bridge-builder.

The result? A second term for Clinton in a race that was remarkably easy given where his political fate stood two years prior to the 1996 election. (Cynical Congressional Democrats will note that while Clinton won re-election in 1996, it took the party another ten years to reclaim the House and Senate majorities they lost in 1994.)

Not everyone ascribes to the Clinton model of benefiting from divided government when it comes to Obama in 2012, however.

“Power is better,” said one senior Democratic party strategist. “His opponent is who matters, and if [Republicans] are still in the minority it will continue the empowerment of their crazies and will make him look better and better and will cause awful headaches for their nominee.”

Ultimately, Obama as well as Vice President Joe Biden, who has traveled the country in support of House candidates, will do everything they can to preserve a Democratic majority in the chamber this fall.

But, if, as some political handicappers are beginning to predict, the House flips in the fall, there’s a reasonable case to be made that it could accrue to Obama’s political benefit in 2012.

As I noted a few weeks ago, the suggestion that Clinton’s easy victory in 1996 was “the result” of his triangulation strategy is nonsense. The economy decided Clinton’s fate, and it will decide Obama’s too. Republican control of the House will hinder Obama’s ability to achieve his policy objectives and provide him with relatively little political benefit.

It looks like Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) and the other Republicans promoting repeal of the health care reform bill need some civics lessons. Here are the last four tweets to Inglis’s Twitter account in chronological order (via Steve Singiser):

-What do you do when Congress passes a bad bill? You get a new Congress to repeal it!
-There’s no bill passed by one Congress that can’t be repealed by another.
-Focusing on the good news–that no Congress can bind a future Congress.
-That means that there’s nothing written by one Congress (a health care bill) that can’t be re-written by the next Congress.

In reality, however, a new Congress is hardly enough. Slate’s Christopher Beam outlines the scenarios:

What would it take to repeal health care reform?
Realistically, a Republican majority in the House and Senate, plus a Republican president. Even if the GOP won back a majority in the House and Senate in 2010, President Obama could still veto any legislation that would repeal any part of health care reform. Republicans would then need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override his veto. That’s unlikely.

If the Republicans control the House, Senate, and presidency in 2012, they will still need 60 votes in the Senate to overhaul the bill in its entirety. They could, however, cut off funding for it through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a 51-vote majority. But they wouldn’t be able to tamper with any part of the legislation that doesn’t affect the budget, such as the ban on discrimination against pre-existing conditions.

What I think is less clear to most people, however, is that repealing the key provisions of the bill may be impossible for Republicans even if they take back unified control of government in the 2012 elections.

The reason is that the legislation is built around the so-called “three-legged stool” of a ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions (to ensure access), subsidies to help people purchase coverage (to ensure affordability), and a mandate that everyone obtain insurance (to prevent free-riding and keep healthy people in risk pools). It’s unimaginable that Republicans would repeal the pre-existing conditions provision, and getting rid of subsidies is likely to be extremely unpopular. That leaves mandates. While they may seem unpopular, getting rid of them alone would create a death spiral that would bankrupt insurance companies. As a result, the health care industry would likely unite with Democrats to block any attempt to eliminate the mandate provision.

In short, the major provisions of the new system are here to stay — I think it’s likely that Republicans will eventually scale back their apocalyptic rhetoric and focus on nudging the system in a more market-friendly direction. The problem is that their base has been whipped into such a frenzy that they will accept nothing less than full repeal. How long until reality intervenes?

Update 3/25 11:38 AM: More details and reactions are emerging. For instance, a senior GOP aide told Greg Sargent the Republican strategy will be to pursue “piece by piece” repeal:

There’s “nothing partial” about our repeal push, the senior Senate GOP aide told me, adding: “But it will be articulated piece by piece so our position won’t be misconstrued as walking away from the goals of reform.”

…Case in point: Preexisting conditions. If Republicans pledge full repeal, they risk being painted as favoring the insurance industry’s right to discriminate along these lines.

Solution: “Republicans will work to repeal the mandates forced on individuals and small businesses and replace it with market based solutions and high risk pools so that nobody will be denied coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions,” the aide says.

But for the reasons described above, it’s not clear that you can remove mandates without creating insurance death spirals.

Also, via John Holbo, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru essentially concedes the point I make above about the difficulty of repeal:

Understandably, [Republican senator John] Cornyn doesn’t want to touch the most popular element of Obamacare, the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But unless it’s modified substantially, the individual mandate has to stay too — and therefore so do the subsidies and the minimum-benefits regs. Without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.

It’s only a matter of time until others realize this as well.

Update 3/25 1:37 PM: Yet more Republicans proposing partial repeal, such as getting rid of the mandate but keeping other components, without explaining how such a policy would work.

In today’s New York Times, Peter Beinart describes President Obama as having “failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president” and calls him “our third highly polarizing president in a row”:

“Let’s face it, he’s failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president, the one who can use rationality and calm debate to bridge our traditional divides,” said Peter Beinart, a liberal essayist who is publishing a history of hubris in politics. “It turns out he’s our third highly polarizing president in a row. But for his liberal base, it confirms that they were right to believe in the guy — and they had their doubts.”

There’s no question that Obama has highly polarized approval ratings. It’s less clear whether he could have done anything to avoid this fate, particularly given the GOP strategy of unified opposition to his initiatives. Beinart seems to think Obama’s decision not to scale back health care reform was polarizing, but as Matthew Yglesias points out in The Daily Beast there was no one in the GOP caucus to compromise with. And even if Obama had struck a deal with a handful of moderate Republicans, does anyone think it would have closed the partisan gap in his approval ratings?

In general, the problem with Beinart’s analysis, which seems to fault Obama for this outcome, is that it’s virtually impossible to be a non-polarizing president in contemporary American politics. Like George W. Bush, Obama made unrealistic promises to bring the parties together, but there was little chance he would succeed. As UCSD’s Gary Jacobson has shown, presidential approval ratings by party have diverged widely over the last thirty or so years (the one partial exception is George H.W. Bush, a non-conservative holdover from the pre-Reagan era):

For the foreseeable future, every president will have highly polarized approval ratings outside of honeymoon periods, wars, and foreign policy crises. Obama’s inability to escape this fate isn’t a “failure” so much as it is, well, reality.

Update 3/22 11:53 AM: There’s a similar passage in David Sanger’s news analysis in the Times above Boehlert’s quote that I should have included (via Eric Boehlert):

But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.

The same argument applies.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-Breakdowns of last night’s House vote on health care reform by the New York Times, Stanford’s Simon Jackman, and 538’s Nate Silver
-John Thune is yet another GOP supply-sider with presidential aspirations: “I’m always for cutting … marginal rates because you get more revenue”
–The unscientific state of forensic evidence in the criminal justice system
-NYT’s Douthat cites flawed Rasmussen poll on 9/11 conspiracy theories — see this post for a better poll
-Politifact on the “Obama bans fishing” myth
-How have I lived this long without a David Souter bobblehead?
-Is Michael Moore correct that health care reform imposes a $100/day fine for denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions?
-In a GOP primary debate, mentioning NPR is not a good strategic move
-French TV replicates Milgram experiment with reality TV host/audience as motivating authority rather than science
-Dick Armey — ill-informed former majority leader

Michael Kinsley is a brilliant writer, but sometimes it’s possible to be too glib. Take, for instance, his monocausal explanation in The Atlantic of the decline in trust in civic institutions and government:

Furthermore, as Samuelson notes, the damage is more than just economic. These days everyone is disenchanted with civic institutions and government. They hate the press, they loathe Congress, and so on. Studies by foundations puzzle over why. Was it the ’60s? No, it was the late ’70s and early ’80s, when government failed to deliver on its obligation to provide a stable currency.

Unfortunately for Kinsley, the decline in political and civic trust started long before the spike in inflation in the late ’70s and early ’80s — see, for instance, this chart of National Election Studies data from GW’s John Sides:

A more fine-grained measure of quarterly trust from Ohio State’s Luke Keele also indicates that trust declined before the inflation spike:

Keele does show that perceptions of the state of the economy (which are influenced by inflation) play an important role in government trust, but I don’t know of any serious scholarship that holds Carter-era inflation responsible for causing the secular decline in trust. (Keele blames a decline in social capital instead). What’s especially galling about this is that Kinsley knows that vast effort has been devoted to studying this issue, and he just sweeps it aside in favor of an evidence-free assertion. That may have been appropriate when he hosted Crossfire, but it has no place in The Atlantic.

As I’ve repeatedly noted, journalists have a tendency to attribute electoral outcomes and poll ratings to political tactics rather than the underlying fundamentals (most notably, the state of the economy). That’s why the current Obama blame game has been so painfully predictable.

The latest example comes from TNR’s John Judis. To his credit, Judis has previously written about the central importance of the economy to presidential approval. Nonetheless, his most recent article suggests that Ronald Reagan’s “thematic” communication strategy limited GOP losses in the 1982 elections and should therefore be instructive for the Obama administration:

[A] president’s political acumen–his ability to put the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments–can mitigate the effects of rising unemployment. That’s what Ronald Reagan and the Republicans achieved in the 1982 midterm elections…

Using economic models, some political scientists predicted that Democrats would pick up as many as 50 House seats. The Democrats also hoped to win back the Senate, which they had lost in 1980. But when the votes were tallied, the Republicans lost 26 House seats and kept their 54 seats in the Senate. How did Reagan and the Republicans manage to contain their losses in this midterm election? That’s a question not simply of historical interest, but of direct relevance to Obama and the Democrats who are likely to face a similar, although perhaps not as severe, economic situation in November 2010.

Reagan blamed the Democrats for leaving him with “the worst economic mess in half a century”… By cutting spending and taxes, Reagan claimed that he was showing the way toward a recovery…

Reagan stated this theme not once, but hundreds of times and in virtually the same words, and it was featured in national Republican ads….

Obama understood the importance of thematic politics in his presidential campaign, but he and his political advisors have yet to find a way to characterize what he has tried to do as president…

In general, I’m skeptical of claims that Reagan’s communication style had large macro effects on politics. Here’s what I wrote, for instance, about a similar claim by the New Yorker’s George Packer:

Packer suggests the President needs to convey “a strong worldview” like Ronald Reagan, who supposedly succeeded despite the recession of 1981-1982 and political compromises with Democrats because he conveyed such a worldview: “Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war.”

In reality, Reagan “could recover” because the economy recovered. His supposedly clearer worldview didn’t seem to change media coverage or his approval ratings in 1981-1982 when the economy was at its worst. There’s no reason to think that speeches conveying a clearer worldview would have a significant effect on Obama’s standing.

To see if this intuition held up, I asked Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who is forecasting the 2010 election, if there’s any evidence to support Judis’s claim that the GOP overperformed in 1982 relative to what we would have otherwise expected. Here’s what he wrote:

Interesting question. The model predicts a loss of 27 seats and the actual loss was 26 seats. That’s using a model with separate dummy variables for first and second midterms. With a single dummy variable, the predicted seat loss is 32 or 33 seats. Still very close to the actual seat loss. But two of the predictors in the model are the generic ballot and net presidential approval in late August or early September, both of which could possibly be influenced by presidential actions. I’d have to go back and check whether either one showed any improvement for the GOP during the spring and summer of 82. My guess is that they did not, though, in which case the Reagan strategy argument would be undermined.

After checking, he reported back:

First, Reagan’s approval rating sank during 1982. He started out in the upper 40s and ended up in the low 40s by the time of the election. Not exactly an indication that his strategy was working to help Republicans in the midterm election. You’d want a higher approval rating, not a lower approval rating.

Second, the Democratic lead in the generic ballot was large throughout the year and never diminished. The average lead was 12 points in January, 18 points in April, 20 points in May-July, 18 points in August, and 19 points in the last pre-election poll in late September. So no sign there that Reagan’s strategy was working.

Abramowitz also verified that these results were not affected by the inclusion of the 1982 election by excluding it from the data used to forecast the outcome of that election:

The out of sample forecasts are a loss of 33 seats for the model with the simple midterm dummy variable and a loss of 27 seats for the model with separate first and second midterm dummy variables–82 was a first midterm of course, so a slightly smaller seat loss is predicted. Not bad.

Similarly, while Judis cites relatively old forecasts of House seat change in the 1982 election, a more recent model perfectly forecasts the net House seat change for 1982 out of sample (i.e., excluding data from that year).

In short, don’t buy the hype. Reagan may have been an effective communicator, but we attribute his success to those skills in large part because the economy rebounded in time to create a landslide in his 1984 campaign against Walter Mondale. There’s no convincing evidence that his “thematic” approach improved the GOP’s performance in 1982. For the same reasons, while Obama’s communications strategy could probably be improved, it’s not clear that doing so would significantly change the outcome in November.

Update 3/19 10:00 AM: I passed on a commenter’s request for comparable Senate projections for 1982 to Abramowitz. Here’s what he wrote:

The models (they’re identical to the House models) predict Republican losses of 2 or 3 seats. The actual result was a loss of 1 (or 0 if you factor in pickup of Byrd’s seat in VA). The key here is that Republicans were only defending 13 seats vs. 19 Dem seats in 82.

In other words, the Senate results, like those in the House, can largely be explained by the political fundamentals. There’s no evidence that Reagan’s message caused Republicans to perform unusually well in 1982.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:

-David Brooks: Hacky and wrong
-Brad DeLong values bloggers on the Kaus scale — I’m available at those rates!

-Rep. Alan Grayson has a dignity problem

-Vaccine/autism link again discredited — someone tell the Huffington Post
-I guarantee you’ve never heard anyone rap around Rutherford B. Hayes before

-Judge concludes Filegate was “nothing more than a bureaucratic snafu”
-Myth Obama is going to ban sport fishing spreads rapidly despite being totally bogus
-TNR’s Jon Chait on the health care reform debate as “a low point in our national political psyche”

The latest example of conservative postmodernism comes from a Noah Schachtman’s Wired story on Andrew Breitbart (founder of the websites Big Journalism, Big Government, and Big Hollywood), which discusses Big Government blogger Michael Walsh’s utter indifference to the truth:

The stories don’t even have to be true to be useful. In December, Big Government’s Michael Walsh put together a list of the top stories the mainstream media missed in 2009. Number four: Sarah Palin’s claim that the health care bill included a “death panel” that would decide the fate of the infirm and disabled. Of course, Palin’s claim — thoroughly discredited — was one of the most widely covered stories of the year. But for Walsh, none of that mattered. Death panels were “a marker for the entire Sarah Palin story,” he says. “Sarah Palin makes the Left’s heads explode. If only for that, it belongs on the list.”

Just to review:
1. Walsh claimed “death panels” was one of the stories the mainstream media missed and implied it was true, stating that “In one pithy phrase, the Woman Who Drives the Left Nuts [Palin] drove them nuts yet again by summing up all that is wrong and monstrous about Obamacare.”
2. In fact, “death panels” was (a) “one of the most widely covered stories of the year” and (b) utterly false. In other words, it wasn’t missed and it wasn’t a legitimate story.
3. Walsh says he doesn’t care and that “death panels” belongs on the list anyway because it infuriates liberals.

Update 3/12 1:59 PM: Per David’s comment below, I should clarify that Walsh changed his criteria for “death panels,” stating that “the MSM ignored/made fun of the story” (other stories are listed simply as being “ignored”). However, the claim that the mainstream media made fun of “death panels” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either. A substantial portion of coverage was critical, but rightly so — the claim was false! In addition, many outlets were far too agnostic in their reporting about the merits of the claim.

Via TAP’s Mori Dinauer, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen pretends to read Barack Obama’s mind — time to break out the swami (emphasis mine):

The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which is about as far from the East Coast as you can get in the United States. “He’s very much a member of the post-Western world,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund.

The great struggles of the Cold War, which bound Europe and the United States, did not mark Obama, whose intellect and priorities were shaped by globalization, and whose feelings are tied more to the Pacific and to Africa. He can make a respectable speech on a Normandy beach, but he’s probably the first U.S. president for whom the Allied landing is emotionally remote.

Sadly, this sort of projection is common practice among both reporters and pundits. After all, why should we let a lack of evidence get in the way of a good story?

As predicted, the press continues to invent an array of silly narratives blaming the tactics of Obama and his staff for the President’s current political standing.

The latest example is George Packer’s New Yorker article, which heads downhill from the hack subtitle “The President’s failure to connect with ordinary Americans.” As I wrote, presidents “connect” when they’re popular, and they’re popular when the economy is strong.

The underlying analytical claim of Packer’s piece is that Obama is in trouble because he has “struggled to convey to his countrymen that he understands their suffering, and knows what to do about it.” Packer suggests the President needs to convey “a strong worldview” like Ronald Reagan, who supposedly succeeded despite the recession of 1981-1982 and political compromises with Democrats because he conveyed such a worldview: “Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war.”

In reality, Reagan “could recover” because the economy recovered. His supposedly clearer worldview didn’t seem to change media coverage or his approval ratings in 1981-1982 when the economy was at its worst. There’s no reason to think that speeches conveying a clearer worldview would have a significant effect on Obama’s standing. (Per Matthew Dickinson, see also the New York Times profile of David Axelrod for additional pining for a better meta-narrative.)

An even more insipid analysis comes from Time’s Mark Halperin, who blames “much of the political predicament in which the present decider finds himself today” on Obama’s lack of a chief economic spokesperson, lack of sufficient political and policy integration, failure to distance himself from Congressional Democrats, and failure to delegate to his cabinet on domestic policy. Really? Obama’s “political predicament” would be different if he turned loose Ray LaHood? (See Jonathan Bernstein for more on Halperin; I refuse to dignify the piece with a longer response.)

In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama’s speeches will start “connecting” and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become.