Brendan Nyhan

We often forget that the government of this country was run in a highly partisan manner until the early- to mid-twentieth century. Given the US attorney scandal, new disclosures of partisan activities at the General Services Administration, and this Los Angeles Times op-ed from Joseph D. Rich, a career attorney at DOJ (among other things), it seems like we may be returning to that approach. Here’s how Rich opens the piece:

The scandal unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest.

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

Rich’s experience mirrors that of career experts and administrators across the federal government. This White House has ignored, suppressed, and overruled dissenting views across the government to a greater extent than any recent administration (see also The Republican War on Science). Politics, it seems, always comes first.

Can the federal government recover? It’s not clear. If we look at the trajectory of civil service reform since the end of Reconstruction, we see that the Pendleton Act, which eventually helped create the professional civil service, was passed during a period of high partisanship, but the Hatch Act, which limited partisan activities by government employees, was not passed until party polarization had declined dramatically:

With party polarization reaching levels not seen since the late 19th century, it’s not hard to imagine that the style of federal governance will slide back toward previous norms.

[Note: To compute my rough measure of party polarization, I calculate the distance between the median members of the two parties in DW-NOMINATE for the House and Senate and average those values.]

Talking points that annoy me — the claim that Democrats allowing all or part of the Bush tax cuts to expire would represent the “largest tax increase in American history”:

Almost all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts are now set to expire at the end of 2010. Democrats have said they want to extend most of them, but they have adopted tough “pay-as-you-go” requirements that will require Congress to pay for new spending and additional tax cuts with tax increases or savings in other areas.

…Republicans said the Democratic budget would lead to huge tax increases without doing anything to slow the explosive growth of entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

“No matter how they spin it, no matter how they dodge it, they will raise taxes,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, in debate on the House floor. “Numbers don’t lie. This budget, this Democratic budget, gives us the largest tax increase in American history.”

Actually, President Bush and the Republican Congress wrote the largest tax increase in history into the law. And I’m sure Rep. Ryan voted for it at the time. It’s time for them to lie in the bed they made.

We could have had another Saturday Night Massacre:

Mr. Sampson also acknowledged publicly for the first time that he proposed replacing Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, at a White House meeting in 2006. Mr. Fitzgerald was then prosecuting the case involving the leak of the identity of Valerie Wilson, the C.I.A. officer. That led to the conviction this month of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’€™s former chief of staff, on perjury charges.

“I said Patrick Fitzgerald could be added to this list,”€ Mr. Sampson said, recalling a conversation with Ms. Miers and an aide. The suggestion, which he said he regretted, was immediately dropped. “They looked at me like I had said something totally inappropriate, and I had,”€ Mr. Sampson said.

Memo to “loyal Bushies”: When Harriet Miers thinks what you’re proposing is too hackish, that’s a very bad sign.

I’m all for holding politicians accountable for their misstatements, but it looks like Barack Obama is going to get the Al Gore treatment of trivial nitpicking, as Bob Somerby notes — check out this Politico article:

But in Obama’s case, the presidential campaign hazing is complicated by 442 pages of words from his own pen. “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” was written in 1995, when Obama was giving little thought to the political implications of his life story. The words sat barely noticed for almost a decade, then blossomed into a best-seller after Obama’s masterly 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Now they are being read by journalists with intense scrutiny. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune reported that an extensive search found no basis for an episode Obama recounts about a picture he ran across in Life magazine of a “black man who had tried to peel off his skin” in a failed effort to use chemicals to lighten it. Obama writes that “seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack.” The Tribune reported: “Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, ‘It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?’ (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)”

…As another example, consider Obama’s stirring tale for the Selma audience about how he had been conceived by his parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham, because they had been inspired by the fervor following the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights demonstration that was commemorated March 4. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala.,” he said, “because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Ala. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Ala.”

Obama was born in 1961, and the Selma march occurred four years later, in 1965. The New York Times reported that when the senator was asked about the discrepancy later that day, he clarified: “I meant the whole civil rights movement.”

After Stanley Fish’s mystery novel column in the New York Times yesterday, I was all set to hate today’s op-ed about parking from Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor of urban planning. But Shoup makes a compelling economic argument for raising the rates on underpriced parking meters, which generate significant externalities (traffic and pollution) as people drive around looking for scarce spots:

[A] surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather, it is caused by those who have already arrived. Streets are clogged, in part, by drivers searching for a place to park.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts…

When my students and I studied cruising for parking in a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, we found the average cruising time was 3.3 minutes, and the average cruising distance half a mile… Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.

What causes this astonishing waste? As is often the case, the prices are wrong. A national study of downtown parking found that the average price of curb parking is only 20 percent that of parking in a garage, giving drivers a strong incentive to cruise…

[D]rivers often compare parking at the curb to parking in a garage and decide that the price of garage parking is too high. But the truth is that the price of curb parking is too low. Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.

And, like rent-controlled apartments, underpriced curb spaces go to the lucky more often than they do to the deserving… The solution is to set the right price for curb parking.

It’s time for another edition of conservative postmodernism!

According to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, the performance of US attorneys can only be measured in political terms:

Sampson, in remarks obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, spoke dismissively of Democrats’ condemnation of what they call political pressure in the firings.

“The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘performance-related’ reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial,” he said. “A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective … is unsuccessful.”

“[L]argely artificial”! Remember, the Congressional Research Service could find only ten US attorneys who had resigned amidst controversy or been fired in the last 25 years — and none of them were pushed out for partisan political reasons.

(For more on conservative postmodernism, start with Josh Marshall’s 2003 Washington Monthly article and then see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Kevin Drum presents evidence from The Pew Research Center (PDF) showing the public identifying much more strongly with the Democratic Party (50%-35%), supporting increased spending on government programs, and becoming less supportive of social conservatism.

Why did this happen? The best way to understand these shifts is with the concepts of “macropartisanship” and “public mood” developed by UNC political scientist James Stimson. Stimson’s work shows that public mood — an aggregate measure of support for more or less government — tends to move in the opposite direction from policy (after some lag), acting like a thermostat of sorts against overreach in one direction. Stimson’s chart of public mood from 1952-2004 illustrates the pattern nicely:

Similarly, macropartisanship — an aggregate measure of party identification — varies systematically in response to party performance. As such, it is not surprising that the public has slowly turned against Republicans given President Bush’s persistent unpopularity.

(For more, see Stimson’s books Public Opinion in America and Tides of Consent and his co-authored book The Macro Polity.)

Via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, Mike D. at Newsvine executes the greatest MySpace hack of all time:

Read Mike D’s post for the details, but the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t steal other people’s bandwidth, especially if you’re running for president…

Talk about phoning it in — Stanley Fish just published a fascinating Times op-ed about how he picked a mystery novel at the airport (TimesSelect required). The world is a better place. Coming next time: Fish struggles to choose a rental car at the Avis desk.

Like most people to the left of center, I’m excited about the potential of Barack Obama. One can’t help but be inspired by his personal story, especially after reading Dreams of My Father. And he’s bringing people into the political process at a remarkable rate. My sister recently went to a rally in Oakland, CA with 10,000 people. 10,000! In early 2007!

But substantively and politically, the problem is that Obama’s appeal is still rooted in a goo-goo approach to politics. Most people who are supporting Obama, going to his rallies, etc. have no idea what he stands for besides opposition to the war in Iraq. As Andrew Ferguson wrote in the Weekly Standard, the issue chapters in The Audacity of Hope — while undeniably well-written and thoughtful — are stuffed with equivocation and conclude in vague Democratic boilerplate:

On one practical issue after another, at the end of long, tortured passages of chin-pulling and brow-furrowing, after the unexpected praise for Ronald Reagan and for the genius of the free market, the disdain for identity politics and for the overregulation of small business, there’s never a chance that Obama will come down on any side other than the conventionally liberal views of the Democratic party mainstream. It turns out that much of his on-the-one-hand judiciousness is little more than a rhetorical strategy.

Instead, most of Obama’s appeal comes down to his call for a new politics that is less cynical and polarized — a vain hope. Bill Clinton and many other politicians have called for such a change, and none have succeeded. The underlying structural forces that promote polarization are unlikely to relent. And more importantly, polarization is a two-sided phenomenon. Calling for depolarization once you are president is, in practice, a call for the opposition to go along with your initiatives — as in President Bush’s call to “change the tone” (see All the President’s Spin for more). It’s an absurd promise that no candidate can deliver on (though Bush briefly claimed victory at “changing the tone” when his sky-high post-9/11 approval ratings silenced the Democratic opposition).

And as Ron Brownstein points out in a very smart column in the Los Angeles Times (via Tyler Cowen), Obama’s appeal mirrors that of the reformer candidates who have traditionally lost Democratic primaries:

Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.

It’s not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values. Each group finds candidates who reflect those priorities.

Democratic professionals often describe this sorting as a competition between upscale “wine track” candidates and blue-collar “beer track” contenders. Another way to express the difference is to borrow from historian John Milton Cooper Jr.’s telling comparison of the pugnacious Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic Woodrow Wilson. Cooper described the long rivalry between Republican Roosevelt and Democrat Wilson as a contest between a warrior and a priest. In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest.

Warrior candidates stress their ability to deliver on kitchen table concerns and revel in political combat. They tout their experience and flout their scars. Their greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don’t so much inspire as reassure. Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004.

The priests, whose lineage runs back through McCarthy to Adlai Stevenson, present a very different face. They write books and sometimes verse. They observe the campaign’s hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment. Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by inchoate longing for a “new politics” as tangible demands for new policies. In the past quarter of a century, Hart, Bradley and the late neo-liberal Paul Tsongas in 1992 each embodied the priest in Democratic presidential politics.

…Hillary Clinton has firmly positioned herself as a warrior. She wowed the firefighters’ convention not through eloquence but passionate declarations of shared commitments. “You were there when we needed you, and I want you to know I will be there when you need me,” she insisted. Her campaign already views non-college voters, especially women, as the foundation of her coalition. Her stump speech, centered on a promise to represent “invisible” Americans, targets the economic anxieties of blue-collar families.

Obama’s aides resist the collar, but in the early stages, he looks more like a priest. He’s written two bestselling books. Like McCarthy, Hart and Howard Dean, he’s ignited a brush fire on college campuses. His initial message revolves heavily around eloquent but somewhat amorphous promises of reform and civic renewal. He laments “the smallness of our politics … where power is always trumping principle.”

What Obama needs is to get out of the Tsongas/Hart box and engage in a serious debate over policy with Hillary and John Edwards. Soon. It will change his profile and engage downscale voters who don’t care so much about process.