Brendan Nyhan

Kevin Drum flags Matt Taibbi overpromising and underdelivering on his allegations of vote fraud in Ohio. No surprise there. The Democrats even conceded that there was no evidence of fraud when releasing their report on irregularities in Ohio (which does show that we to improve access to the polls so that people don’t have to wait in line for hours).

More importantly, Walter Mebane, a respected political scientist at Cornell who consulted on the DNC report, told the Washington Post that it is “highly unlikely” that Kerry would have won Ohio no matter what:

Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University and member of the task force, said Ohio suffered from a “gross administrative failure” on Election Day. But he later said there was no “support whatsoever for the claim that there was a large-scale misallocation of vote from [Democratic nominee John F.] Kerry to [President] Bush in Ohio” and said it is highly unlikely Kerry would have won the state in any case.

…Mebane stopped short of charging that Republicans had deliberately set out to frustrate Democratic voters. He said the scope of the study could not determine whether there was any partisan intent and noted that local election boards, which determine the distribution of voting machines, are bipartisan.

Barring more solid evidence, it’s time to put this conspiracy theory to bed.

Writing in the New York Times today, David Brooks notes that a series of social indicators that are all moving in a positive direction:

The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors…

In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We’re in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

Is this the post-Information Age social revival that Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama predicted? Though many people took issue with Putnam’s pessisism in his original “Bowling Alone” article, it’s less well known that he believes a major social revival is likely to occur as outdated social arrangements are replaced with more effective ones.

Here’s an excerpt from the background statement to the Saguaro Seminar, an effort to promote such a revival that Putnam co-chaired at Harvard (which led to the book Better Together):

History further tells us that we have the ability to bolster our civic connectedness. One hundred years ago, in 1897, the United States faced similar circumstances. Americans were not connecting with one another to the degree that was desirable, from 30 to 40 years of dramatic technological and social change rendering obsolete a whole stock of social capital. American society displayed classic symptoms of social-capital deficiency: huge problems in the cities, concerns about political corruption, and growing class antagonism.

Then, within the next two decades, American civil society righted itself in one of the nation’s greatest bursts of social innovation. Virtually all of the major civic institutions that endure to this day were created during these 20 years: the YWCA, the Boy Scouts, the American Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the Urban League, trade unions, fraternal organizations, and many others. Almost all of these institutions were created in response to the decay and irrelevance of earlier forms of social connectedness.

The Saguaro Seminar is posited on the belief that we are poised on the threshold of a similarly innovative era. Society is different and the causes of a stagnant stock of social capital are different than they were in the 1890s. Thus, the solutions will be different. We need to determine what institutions, mechanisms, incentives, and approaches will significantly increase our stock of social capital and re-engage Americans with their communities.

Fukuyama made roughly the same argument in The Great Disruption. Back in the late 1990s, both predictions seemed optimistic, but if they turn out to be correct, it will mark a major turning point in American society.

For the 500th time, President Bush’s tax cuts have not increased federal tax revenue — they’ve dramatically reduced it. (See my last post on this subject for details.) But Bush keeps suggesting that his tax cuts have made the deficit smaller. The latest example comes from his weekly radio address:

The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped
increase revenues to the Treasury. The increased revenues and our
spending restraint have led to good progress in reducing the federal
deficit. Last month we learned that the deficit is now projected to be
$94 billion less than previously expected. I set a goal of cutting the
deficit in half by 2009, and we are ahead of pace to meet that goal.

This is intellectually fraudulent. But because Bush has done the same thing so many times before (and because the subject isn’t dramatic or titillating), the press will once again ignore it.

I think it’s a scandal that we don’t have universal health insurance in this country, but Congressman Pete Stark has gone off the deep end:

We’re the only country in the world — not the only civilized country, not the only industrialized country, not the only non-third world country — we’re the only country in the world that does not provide health care to all of its residents.

It is true that the US stands out among industrialized countries in not having universal health care, but plenty of developing countries don’t have it either. Stark is wrong. Here’s the International Labor Organization:

A big challenge for social protection is providing
access to adequate care. People in industrialized countries enjoy almost
universal access to third-party financed health care. In Ireland, the Nordic countries, Southern Europe and the United Kingdom, national
health services are financed out of state revenues. However, in many low- and
middle-income countries, universal coverage is rare.

And yes, Stark is the ranking Democrat on the Health subcommittee of Ways and Means.

Update 8/8: Yes, people in this country can get care at the emergency room even if they can’t afford it. No, that’s not universal health care — at least not in the sense that almost everyone (including me) defines it. And clearly Stark doesn’t define it that way either.

As part of the debate over renewing the Voting Rights Act, a group called Why Tuesday is lobbying to move Election Day to a weekend to promote higher turnout. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Andrew Young lays out the rationale in an Atlanta Journal Constitution op-ed (registration required):

Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of the act, the most successful voting legislation in our nation’s history. Just months after its passage, 455,000 Americans effectively gained the right to vote.

But we cannot rest complacently. Forty years ago we fought so that every American had the right to vote, while now we fight so that our democracy affords all eligible Americans the best viable opportunity to vote. Just think about one question fundamental to whether our voting system welcomes participation or inhibits it: Why Tuesday?

Holding national elections on Tuesdays is not required by the U.S. Constitution. Instead, this Election Day was established in 1845 by federal law. In those rural, agrarian years, Tuesday was a convenient day for most eligible voters — rural workers and land-owning gentry — to journey to the county seat and vote. Congress ruled out other days mostly by default.

Times have changed. Holding federal elections on the first Tuesday in November, usually between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., allows the majority of working Americans only one or two hours to vote. As a result, long lines and crowded polling places have become synonymous with voting.

According to recent census data, “too busy/schedule conflicts” was the reason most cited for not voting. That far outweighed other cited causes typically thought to be obstacles, including “didn’t like candidates/issues,” “registration problems” and “inconvenient polling place.”

Why are Americans asked to exercise the vote mostly in one weekday?

As I mentioned before, Hillary’s refusal to pledge to serve out her next term is the perfect issue for Republicans to set up a narrative describing her as opportunistic. But she’s still holding out on the pledge against the wishes of 60 percent of New Yorkers.

So why run again for the Senate? Why set this up? As Chuck Todd argues on National Journal (subscription required), she’s definitely running for president. So why run again for the Senate? One reason that Todd’s analysis suggests is that lets her raise tons of money even though her race is non-competitive:

The former first lady posted the highest off-year Senate fund-raising total we’ve ever seen, raising nearly $6 million in the second quarter of 2005. With no major opposition for re-election, the idea of Clinton having somewhere between $30 million and $50 million to transfer to her presidential campaign account in January 2007 (the month she’d likely announce something more formal) is very real.

Thus, we’re going to avoid the whole “should she run” debate since, in our minds, it’s a moot point — she’s running.

$30+ million would make her a massive frontrunner in the Democratic race. But if the American people see her as opportunistically ducking out on New York, it won’t matter in the end. And it’s not like she’s going to have trouble raising money. So why extract it now under false pretenses?

One huge difference between the Clinton and Bush administrations is the way their poll numbers are covered in the press. When Clinton dipped in the polls, the media would inevitably write a slew of process stories about an administration in disarray, the need to change tactics, etc. But when Bush’s approval ratings
drop to the low 40s (via Atrios) after the narrowest re-election since Woodrow Wilson, well, nothing happens.

Why? Well, the first difference is that Bush’s people don’t leak, so the reporters have no information to hang the process stories on. In addition, 9/11 made Bush seem invincible, and the White House is unwilling to concede the importance or even the legitimacy of the poll numbers. But here in the reality-based community, the truth is clear: Bush is not very popular. And it’s already starting to bite him in the a– (see: stem cells, Social Security, Iraq, etc.).

If a president drops in the polls and no one notices, does he make a sound when he hits bottom?

Glenn Reynolds endorses Joan Vennochi’s call for state stem cell initiatives in the Boston Globe:

A few years ago we saw a raft of anti-technology stuff… I notice now that we’re seeing more from the other side….

This confluence — together with poll data and other recent indicators — suggests to me that Joan Vennochi is giving the Democrats good advice on stem cells:

Democrats should also do with stem cell research what Republicans did with gay marriage: present the issue for a vote on every possible state ballot. Republican Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader from Tennessee, just demonstrated the power of the issue. Frist’s surprise endorsement of a bill that would approve federal funds for new lines of stem cells enraged the right. But Frist knows the political center supports it, and the political center is where a presidential contender wants to be. In stem cell research, Democrats, for once, have an issue that fires up their base and cuts to the center, across diverse demographic groups.

I think that’s right. This is an issue where the GOP is tied to its base, and where swing voters go the other way. Interestingly, there’s plenty of opportunity for the GOP to weaken this assault by supporting other kinds of life-extending and life-improving research — into aging, for example — to blunt efforts to tar it as the party of Luddites and fundamentalists. Will they be smart enough to do that?

I agree that stem cell research is good politics. But the problem is that state-level initiatives are likely to be bad policy: states will end up competing against each other, throwing good money after bad to support research that is still in its early stages. California’s initiative has already been plagued with controversy due to a lack of transparency and accountability in the way it will disburse $3 billion in taxpayer funds. The potential for capture by the stem cell industry is high. (And initiatives are a lousy way to make policy in general.)

The upshot is that we need a good national stem cell policy, not a patchwork of state policies.

Losing a highly polarized election has turned John Kerry into a pariah. Republicans hate him because of what he stands for, and Democrats hate him for losing. A Gallup poll conducted July 25-28 (margin of error +/-3%) shows that even Hillary is substantially more popular than Kerry. I’ve never taken him seriously for 2008, but these numbers have to be seen as another nail in the coffin for his candidacy.

John Kerry:
Favorable 42%
Unfavorable 48
Never heard of 3
No opinion 7

Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Favorable 53%
Unfavorable 43
No opinion 4

(Gallup also found that John McCain and Rudy Guiliani have vastly superior numbers and beat Clinton and Kerry in head-to-head matchups. But since neither of them will win the GOP nomination, that’s a moot point. Also, McCain and Giuliani’s numbers are inflated due to the lack of Democratic criticism they have received in the last few years. If and when they run for president, their profiles will change dramatically.)

James Taranto of Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web Today is the latest figure to tout the myth that Paul Begala accused Republicans of wanting to kill him.

But as August J. Pollak showed, while Begala did switch between using the imprecise pronoun “they” to refer to Republicans and using it to refer to terrorists, it is clear in context that the phrase “They want to kill me and my children” referred to terrorists:

…[W]e sit back and allow George W. Bush and our Republican friends to pull out 9/11 like a cheap handgun in a bar fight. Okay? “9/11.” There’s a drought in the Midwest. “9/11.” The deficit’s up. “9/11” You know? But, I think we need to fight them on that. I think, frankly they did a piss-poor job of defending us, and their strategy was always “we’ll fight them over there so we don’t fight them here.” Well guess what, bin Laden didn’t get the memo. He wants to fight us here as well as we saw in London last week. And so, the- their theory is, “we can’t really do everything to protect our country because we have to cut taxes for the rich.” And so, it… they want to kill us- particularly this city and New York and some other places. I was driving past the pentagon when that plane hit. I had friends on that plane, this is deadly serious to me- they want to kill me and my children if they can. But if they just kill me and not my children, they want my children to be comforted that while they didn’t protect me because they cut my taxes, my children won’t have to pay any money on the money they inherit. You know, that is bullshit national defense and we should say that. (MP3 audio)

Update 8/4: Nony Mouse points out in comments that Taranto corrected himself yesterday.