Brendan Nyhan

In a New York Times Magazine essay, Matt Bai suggests that Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty of scorning dissent:

Such an acknowledgment of common purpose has all but vanished, as the realignment in American politics — a hardening of regional loyalties that began with battles over civil rights and Vietnam — deepened the cultural divisions in Washington. Each party has demonized the other and embraced the notion that dissent can have no moral or intellectual value.

While some Democrats have certainly criticized or undermined dissent, I’m not aware of any evidence comparable to the pattern of vicious attacks on dissent by Republicans between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the end of George W. Bush’s time in office. This is a classic example of false equivalence.

National Journal has released its 2008 rankings of members of Congress from liberal to conservative, which means it’s time for another reminder not to rely on their fairly primitive methodology. The rankings produced by UCLA’s Jeff Lewis and UCSD’s Keith Poole for the 110th House and Senate are vastly preferable (they scale almost all votes, rather than just a few, and use a far more sophisticated statistical approach).

PS I will admit, however, that National Journal does have a fun interactive web application based on their rankings. Too bad the data going into it are so lame.

As you may have noticed, my blogging has tailed off dramatically in recent weeks. The reason is that I’m in the process of finishing up my dissertation. Posting will return to normal once it gets the final stamp of approval…

John DiIulio quoted by Ron Suskind in Esquire, 1/1/03:

“I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he writes. “There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.”

Michael Gerson, former head speechwriter in the White House, writing in the Washington Post about Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and his ideas regarding state Medicaid waivers granted by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (via Brad DeLong):

At a recent meeting of conservative activists, Jindal had little to say about his traditional social views or compelling personal story. Instead, he uncorked a fluent, substantive rush of policy proposals and achievements, covering workforce development, biodiesel refineries, quality assurance centers, digital media, Medicare parts C and D, and state waivers to the CMS (whatever that is).

PS Gerson’s ignorance (whether real or feigned) echoes GOP chairman Michael Steele (“Exactly what is a fish passage barrier…?”) and Jindal in his response to President Obama’s speech to Congress (“$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring’”). As Kevin Drum notes, these expressions of ignorance are absurd when you can just google “CMS” or “fish passage” or “volcano monitoring” and find out what they are. Can we direct all the resources of Let Me Google That For You to GOP headquarters?

Back in 2006, I caught the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer recycling the same World War II quote to denounce supposed appeasement in 1989, 1994, and 2006:

Consider Charles Krauthammer, an influential Washington Post — and TIME magazine — columnist and administration ally. He is the probable source of Rumsfeld’s quote, having used it in his August 11 newspaper column about Iran. In doing so, he joined what writer Ross Douthat calls the growing number of conservatives who see “Iran’s march toward nuclear power” as “the equivalent of Hitler’s 1930s brinkmanship.” And a Nexis search reveals that Krauthammer tends to see Hitler analogies everywhere — he trotted out the same Borah quote to denounce the alleged appeasement of China in 1989 and North Korea in 1994.

Now Brad Johnson of Think Progress has caught George Will, another Post columnist, engaging in far more extensive recycling (via Chris Mooney) of quotes, arguments, and almost verbatim passages from previous columns in 1992, 1999, 2004 (here and here) and 2006. Will anyone notice? It’s time to bring some accountability to the pundit class…

This is too much. First Karl Rove lectures the Obama administration on White House management. Now he’s criticizing their economic statistics!

Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would “save or create” 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers, and they knew there’s no way to count “saved” jobs.

Rove is certainly right that we have no precise way to estimate how many jobs are “saved” or created as a result of the stimulus bill, but the exact same critique applies to the Bush administration’s bogus claims that President Bush’s economic policies created [X] million jobs. In both cases, we want to estimate the causal effect of an economic policy. However, that requires us to compare the observed number of jobs with an unobserved counterfactual — the number of jobs that would have occurred without the policy in question. We can try to estimate the latter quantity, but we certainly don’t know it with certainty.

At a more general level, it’s worth pointing out again that the Bush administration broke new ground in its use of misleading statistics to promote its tax and budget policies. (We devoted two chapters of All the President’s Spin to the subject, and it only covers Bush’s first term.) The idea that Karl Rove is suddenly concerned about the purity of economic statistics is laughable.

Here’s the headline of yesterday’s today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on the Obama mortgage plan:

Dukes of Moral Hazard

They’ll be here all night — tip your waiters and bartenders!

Matthew Yglesias correctly dings Richard Cohen for this passage:

Congressional Republicans have made a stand on the stimulus package, just as they did on the original bank bailout when they refused to accommodate a president of their own party, George W. Bush. These Republicans are as wrong as wrong can be, and history, I am sure, will mock them, but they were not elected by history, and they are impervious to mockery from the likes of me. They come from conservative districts, and they are voting as their people want them to. That’s partisanship. It is also democracy…

Reality is real. No amount of lofty rhetoric is going to change the way members of Congress are elected. Most of them come from exquisitely gerrymandered districts created by computers that could, if good taste allowed, part the marital bed, separating husband from wife if they were of different political parties. This system created districts that are frequently reliably liberal or conservative. The computer has deleted the middle.

As Yglesias notes, “There’s something to this, but it can’t explain the fact that all the House Republicans voted ‘no.’ Nor can it explain the Senate, where many Senators representing states Obama won voted ‘no.’ There’s more to legislative partisanship than manipulation of district boundaries.”

In fact, the evidence suggests that gerrymandering has played a relatively small role in the increase in polarization. As UT-Austin’s Sean Theriault emphasizes in his book Party Polarization in Congress, the Senate has polarized almost as much as the House in recent decades despite not having redistricting. From a more technical perspective, here’s the abstract of a new study on the subject from Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, UCSD’s Keith Poole, and NYU’s Howard Rosenthal (PDF):

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and
polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a
strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little
evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of
the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a
function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences.
Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral”
districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than
those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican
seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

I still support redistricting reform to maximize the number of competitive House elections, but as McCarty et al. note, its effects on polarization are likely to be limited given the way the party system works and the apparent growth in geographic sorting.

PS I love the line “Reality is real.” Maybe Cohen has been taking logic lessons from Mike Huckabee or MIMS…

Update 2/18 9:53 AM: See also Emory’s Alan Abramowitz et al., who conclude that “redistricting has not made [House]
elections less competitive,” and Duke’s David Rohde (one of my advisers) and coauthors, who find that redistricting has increased polarization but “the effect is relatively modest.”

Update 2/20 9:46 PM: In this week’s issue, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg gets the causes of the death of bipartisanship right but the effects of gerrymandering wrong:

[W]hat might be called America’s parliamentary parties have come to resemble their disciplined European counterparts. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, for reasons of history and origins, the Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates, and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship feasible. The post-civil-rights, post-Vietnam realignment, along with the gerrymandered creation of safe districts, has given us—on Capitol Hill, at least—an almost uniformly rightist G.O.P. and a somewhat less uniformly progressive array of Democrats.

Last week Michael Kinsley joined the chorus of people predicting doom for the American newspaper:

And the harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism…

The Times, The Post and a few others probably will survive. When the recession ends, advertising will come back, with fewer places to go…

With even half a dozen papers, the American newspaper industry will be more competitive than it was when there were hundreds…

At this point, everyone has heard the list of reasons that the newspaper business model is in trouble (the Internet, the death of classifieds, etc.). But it’s absurd to think we’ll end up with “half a dozen papers” any time soon. Until recently, that business model generated extremely high profits. Most of the newspapers that are in trouble now are suffering from the results of too much debt, bad acquisitions, etc. We’ll surely see continued newsroom layoffs and reduced profits but I would be shocked if every major metropolitan area doesn’t still have a print daily in ten years.

The best analogy, I think, is what happened during the dotcom boom. Everyone got carried away and started extrapolating wildly from short-term trends, predicting that online stores would take over categories like toys and pet food overnight. Few of those predictions came to pass. I think the same applies here.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I despise judicial elections, which destroy legal norms and create extensive conflicts of interest.

But things could get even worse — the Supreme Court is considering a case from West Virginia about whether a state supreme court justice there should have recused himself from a case involving a coal mining company whose chief executive spent $3 million to defeat the justice in a previous election.

It’s an impossible situation. On the one hand, the recusal seems like common sense — the justice certainly could have personal reasons to rule against the company. But on the other hand, 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.

The only solution, of course, is for states to end judicial elections altogether. But I have little hope of that happening. Taking away the public’s right to vote on candidates of any kind is virtually impossible. (Likewise, there’s no way that the Roberts court would take such a dramatic step, nor is it their place to do so.)