Brendan Nyhan

Former Senator Fred Thompson and the New York Post are the latest conservatives to suggest that President Obama or his administration are sympathetic to terrorists. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Frank Rich joined the emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left in his column today, which smears John McCain as “unpatriotic.”

As Media Matters documented, Thompson tweeted the following joke about President Obama’s popularity:

You know how we could win the war in Afghanistan? Just send Obama over there to campaign for the Taliban.

Similarly, the New York Post published an editorial questioning whether Obama’s Justice Department is on the side of terrorists:

Whose side is the Justice Department on: America’s or the terrorists’?

It’s just insane that a lawyer who defended Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard — and who sought constitutional rights for terrorists — could be one of the Obama administration’s top legal officials.

…With high-profile terror cases coming up — like Abdulmutallab’s, and the outrageous Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial in New York — Americans need to know: Is our government putting in a good-faith effort when it comes to punishing the men who want to blow up our people?

The call to treat terrorists like civilians in court has been all Team Obama.

Which means the president and his administration also owe the American people an answer: Is the government’s prosecutorial deck stacked in favor of the terrorists?

Both statements are part of a long line of slurs against Obama’s loyalty to this country that capitalize on the misperceptions that he is a Muslim or non-citizen.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich has joined Salon’s Joan Walsh and Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan in smearing critics of the president as unpatriotic or traitorous. In his column today, Rich writes that John McCain “epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition” to Obama. Rich provides no evidence to substantiate this assertion other than characterizing McCain as “sneering” during the State of the Union address. It’s sadly characteristic of the tone of much of Rich’s recent work — back in November, he compared the GOP to a series of murderous regimes and cults ranging from the Khmer Rouge to Stalinists to the Jacobins.

A friend’s suggestion spurred me to dump all the junky banner ads (which pay very little anyway) and move to a cleaner and simpler design. Hope it’s an improvement — let me know what you think…

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Gallup reminds us that “President’s Support Usually Unaffected by State of Union”
-People whose job it is to write about politics know nothing about politics
-New York Times takes the lead in the “most insipid Haiti article to date” race
–Moving tributes (PDF) to
David Foster Wallace (via Ari Kohen)
-Best celebrity memoir title ever? David Hasselhoff’s autobiography was called “Don’t Hassel the Hoff”
-The bail system is corrupt and unjust
-It seems somehow appropriate that Tommy Franks serves on the board of Chuck E. Cheese (via Peter Bergen)

As I noted a few years ago, New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer has a penchant for lacing her stories with cutting rhetoric about liberals. It’s all too reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, whose derisive coverage of Bill Clinton and other Democrats helped vault her to the paper’s op-ed page.

The latest example of Steinhauer’s approach appears in her report today on new limits on the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. Late in the article, she works in a gratuitous and unfunny crack about supporters of medical marijuana smelling like patchouli oil:

In a crowded, vaguely patchouli-oil scented [Los Angeles City] Council chamber, advocates for medical marijuana peppered Council members with threats of lawsuits and election challenges.

Similarly, her profile of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi back in 2006 parroted conservative codewords, saying Republicans viewed Pelosi as “an Armani-clad elitist who will help push lawmakers toward an agenda of multicultural, tax-raising appeasement,” and misleadingly claimed Pelosi “favors… schools without prayer and death with taxes.” The last two phrases are GOP spin — Pelosi actually opposes organized prayer in schools (not all prayer) and the estate tax (whose elimination Pelosi opposes) only affects a tiny percentage of the Americans who die each year. (The Times later edited the sentence online to correct these problems.)

Soon afterward, Steinhauer again parroted Republican rhetoric, calling California a place where “American values are said to go to die” and writing that the state has an image as “a hotbed of liberal lunacy.”

If Dowd ever retires, I bet she’s on the short list.

On Friday, I argued that the narrative of President Obama not “connecting” with the American public is a symptom of his declining approval ratings, not the cause.

In a new interview with Diane Sawyer, Obama made a similar point about how perceptions of his personality tend to vary with his popularity:

When your poll numbers drop, you’re an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you’re a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I’m cool and cerebral and cold and detached. If my poll numbers are high, well, he’s calm and reasoned.

So that’s — that’s the filter through which a lot of this stuff is interpreted.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the president understands what the press is doing better than the reporters themselves.

Last Monday, I predicted that the combination of an unfavorable political environment for Democrats and the downward trend in President Obama’s approval ratings will spur the media to create elaborate narratives about how Obama is not “connecting” with the American people.

Thanks to the special election in Massachusetts, those narratives have already arrived, and they’re just as silly as I expected. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, compiles the evidence, which he correctly calls “primitive magical thinking about what presidents can do if they only have just the right message or right tone.”

The reality is that presidential messages tend to work in favorable political environments (i.e. strong economies) and not work in unfavorable environments (i.e. weak economies). Consider the example of Bill Clinton, who struggled early in his first term and was portrayed as failing to communicate with the American people. But when the economy boomed, he became popular and easily won reelection. Not surprisingly, during this period, he was seen as a very effective communicator. Both the press and Clinton administration officials tend to attribute the 1996 victory to various tactical choices (moving to the center, running early ads against Bob Dole, etc.), but as Matthew Yglesias notes Clinton’s “success is easily explained in terms of the economic expansion.”

Or consider Ronald Reagan. He’s remembered as the so-called “Great Communicator,” but that’s after the economy picked up late in his first term and he won a landslide victory over Walter Mondale. However, Reagan was not always viewed that way — he suffered through a recession early in his term that damaged his political standing (his approval trajectory was very similar to Obama’s). The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein reviewed press accounts of Reagan from January 1982, and concluded that “Reagan’s manner [was portrayed as moving] from amiable and clear on the big picture to clueless and oblivious to the important details of governing — and indifferent to suffering — when things were going bad.”

The larger point is, as Bernstein notes, that “character traits are perceived by the press in light of how the president is doing in the polls and in Washington, not the other way around.” In other words, the perception that Obama isn’t “connecting” is a symptom of his declining political status, not the cause.

Via John Sides, David W. Brady, Daniel P. Kessler, and Douglas Rivers have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is likely to fuel Democratic panic in Washington over health care:

The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months is more than a conventional midterm rebound. How can a little known Republican run a competitive Senate campaign in Massachusetts? The culprit is the unpopularity of health reform, and it means that Democrats will face even worse problems later this year in less liberal places than Massachusetts.

We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November…

Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it’s popular, Democratic candidates don’t have too much of a problem, but where it’s unpopular—and that includes most states—the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle…

Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill…

How do we know that it’s the health-reform bill that’s to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states?

First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state’s voters supported Republicans.

Brady and Rivers are highly respected political scientists (I’m not familiar with Kessler), but I’m not sure we can draw strong conclusions from these data. Since health care passed on a perfect party line vote in the Senate, it’s relatively easy to know where an incumbent stands on the issue. And given the salience of the health care debate, the correlation between state opposition to health care reform and support for Republican senate candidates is (a) not surprising and (b) not necessarily causal (especially given that those are aggregate measures).

I tend to think that much of the health care fallout is an expression of economic discontent, but there’s certainly an argument to be made that it has exacerbated the public’s predictable turn away from liberalism. In either case, however, disentangling these factors is extremely difficult.

Update 1/21 8:25 PM: Matt Blackwell makes a similar argument at the Harvard Social Science Statistics blog.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

What is going on in Washington? The panic-induced response to Scott Brown’s special election victory has pushed President Obama and Congressional Democrats into an obviously incoherent health care strategy:

President Obama signaled on Wednesday that he might be willing to scale back his proposed health care overhaul to a version that could attract bipartisan support, as the White House and Congressional Democrats grappled with a political landscape transformed by the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race.

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on ABC News, notably leaving near-universal insurance coverage off his list of core goals…

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders said they were weighing several options. But some lawmakers in both parties began calling for a scaled-back bill that could be adopted quickly with bipartisan support, and Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that if he could not pass an ambitious health care bill, he would be willing to settle for what he could get. In the interview with ABC, he cited two specific goals: cracking down on insurance industry practices that hurt consumers and reining in health costs.

“We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people,” Mr. Obama said. “We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up, and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements to this bill.”

Republican Congressional aides said a compromise bill could include new insurance industry regulations, including a ban on denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions, as well as aid for small businesses for health costs and possible steps to restrict malpractice lawsuits. But as Mr. Obama noted on ABC, a pared-down package imposing restrictions on insurers might make coverage unaffordable, which is one reason he prefers a broad overhaul…

The idea of “a scaled-back bill that could be adopted quickly with bipartisan support” makes no sense:

1. Why would liberals in the House support a stripped-down bill? They already oppose the Senate bill as too conservative. If they’re willing to accept more moderate legislation, the House could just pass the Senate bill and the process would be over.

2. Why would Mitch McConnell or the GOP caucus support a stripped-down bill? Republicans wouldn’t cut a deal when the Democrats were in a position of strength — there’s no reason to think they would abandon their scorched-earth strategy right when it seems to be inflicting damage on the Democrats. As the New York Times notes, when McConnell was asked if the health care bill was dead, he said, “I sure hope so.”

3. Does anyone think Congress has the patience to go through the legislative process again with a new bill?

4. What is the magical proposal that will attract bipartisan support? As Jonathan Chait correctly notes, any compromise that includes a ban on denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions but lacks a mandate and subsidies won’t work:

Cantor does say he wants to ban discrimination against people with preexisting conditions, but for reasons I’ve explained over and over again, you can’t do that without an individual mandate, and you can’t do that without subsidies for those who can’t afford the mandate. So the preexisting condition stuff is just a way of posturing for a popular goal without admitting you oppose the necessary steps to accomplish it.

The Democrats have very few options besides (a) passing a bill on a party-line vote or (b) abandoning health care reform. The panic has made the party desperate to believe that a bipartisan compromise is possible, but I don’t see how it can work.

Update 1/21 12:20 PM: Chait makes a similar point:

[T]he chances of [a scaled-back proposal offered by Ezra Klein], or something remotely like it, passing into law are approximately zero. The Democrats’ biggest worry right now, I have been reliably informed (Yes — reporting! I try not to make a habit of it), is that they think health care has just taken too much time. The want to pivot to an economic message. Writing a new, even smaller health care bill takes a lot of time. There are delicate compromises with interest groups who have the power to destroy legislation if they feel threatened. There are negotiations in two chambers. The senate is feeling incredibly skittish right now and probably unwilling to vote for anything stronger than a resolution saying that if anybody dies because they couldn’t afford medical treatment it would be a darn shame. (And that resolution would come after months of begging Olympia Snowe to cast the filibuster-breaking vote.)

There are only two options on health care: Something that involves passing the Senate bill through the House, and nothing. There’s no fantasy moderate bipartisan alternative. Once Congress gets that through its head, I think — I don’t know but I think — they’ll make the obvious choice.

The question of the moment is what effect Scott Brown’s victory will have on national politics.

It’s important to note that his election to the Senate does relatively little to change the overall balance of power in the country. See, for instance, Joshua Tucker’s helpful chart:

The loss of Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority seems to eliminate the prospect of passing the health care bill through conference committee, but for other legislation, the shift of the pivotal voter from Ben Nelson to Olympia Snowe in the Senate is likely to have a relatively small direct effect. Nelson is currently paying a heavy political price in Nebraska for his support of the health care bill and is unlikely to take a similar risk on future legislation. (On a more technical level, Tucker also notes that the gap between Nelson and Snowe’s ideal points is probably relatively small — see, for instance, Simon Jackman’s estimates [PDF].)

Similarly, we knew Democrats faced an unfavorable environment two weeks ago and that the health care reform plan was relatively unpopular in national polls. Not much has changed on either front.

What matters, however, is the collective interpretation of the election. Even though Brown’s victory was an ambiguous amalgam of national and local factors, including Coakley’s hapless campaign and poor economic conditions, the media is already portraying the outcome as a referendum on President Obama (though a majority of Massachusetts voters approve of his performance) and health care (even though Brown supports a very similar state-run plan in Massachusetts). Debatable as they may be, these interpretations may quickly become conventional wisdom — indeed, many Democrats have already endorsed them.

The most relevant comparison to the current situation might be electoral mandates. The seminal political science research on the subject shows that opposition party legislators tend to deviate from their typical voting patterns in the direction of a perceived mandate for some period of time before returning to normal.

Given the Democratic tendency to panic in these types of situations, we may see a similar shift in voting patterns or a change in the party’s legislative agenda. Pundits will likely claim that Democrats should yield to public opinion as expressed by Massachusetts voters. But it’s not at all clear that such moves will prevent significant losses in the November midterms, nor that there is a “message” from Brown’s victory as such.

Update 1/20 1:50 PM: Based on Brown’s voting record as a state legislator, political scientist Boris Shor estimates that he will become the Senate filibuster pivot rather than Snowe. As I’ve previously argued, I think Brown moved right to motivate the GOP base in a low-turnout special election, so I’m skeptical he’ll pursue such a moderate course (at least right away). But if Shor is correct and Brown is between Nelson and Snowe, it reduces the rightward shift in the filibuster pivot, meaning that Brown’s win would have an even smaller effect than we might have otherwise thought.

Update 1/21 9:36 AM: See also John Sides on the need to admit what we don’t know about the MA results and Greg Marx on the media’s misguided attempts to distill a “message” from the election.

Update 1/22 9:44 AM: Via Matthew Yglesias, Alec MacGillis reports in the Washington Post that “Brown’s victory in Mass. senate race hardly a repudiation of health reform.”

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Given the final poll numbers, it seems likely that Massachusetts Democrats will wake up tomorrow wondering why they didn’t work harder on Martha Coakley’s behalf. It’s a fascinating psychological phenomenon that reverses the usual pattern. As Daniel Gilbert describes in Stumbling on Happiness, people tend to overestimate the extent to which positive or negative events will change their future happiness. But in politics, members of the majority party tend to become disillusioned until some election defeat spurs them again to action. In other words, they underestimate how upsetting an opposition party victory will be. Democrats experienced this feeling after the 1994 election and are likely to do so again in November 2010 if the Massachusetts race doesn’t wake them up.