Brendan Nyhan

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai made the data-free assertion that “the American public doesn’t seem to move very much in its basic attitudes about government”:

The cautionary note here, for jubilant Democrats, is that there is little reason to believe that the electoral trend in their favor actually reflects any widespread ideological shift. If you only look at numerical majorities, it might well seem that the story of the last 20 years in American politics is one in which voters have swerved erratically from one ideological pole to the next, embracing a harsh kind of conservatism in 1994 and then a resurgent liberalism in 2006. In reality, though, the American public doesn’t seem to move very much in its basic attitudes about government, which have remained mostly pragmatic and predictable; simply put, people tend to want a little more government when times are tough and a little less when things are going well. The number of voters who identified themselves in exit polls as conservative, liberal or moderate remained virtually unchanged between 2004 and 2008 — and in fact, those numbers have been more or less steady for decades.

But as I’ve pointed out before, UNC’s Jim Stimson has shown using his “policy mood” measure (Excel file) that the American public’s demand for more or less government is (a) not static and (b) doesn’t simply respond to the state of the economy:

Instead, the public tends to move in the opposite direction from policy (after some lag), acting like a thermostat of sorts against government overreach in a liberal or conservative direction. Stimson has only updated his measure through 2006, but I’d guess that the public has continued to move in a liberal direction as part of a continued backlash against the Bush administration.

Bai’s second point is also uninformed by knowledge of the relevant research. Decades of political science scholarship have shown that individual self-identification as liberal or conservative is a weak indicator of actual policy preferences for most of the population. In fact, Stimson shows in later work that a significant proportion of self-described conservatives want more government spending in various issue areas.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats made the decision I predicted back in May and June and let Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship.

The reason is simple. As the New York Times notes, “Democrats want to avoid driving Mr. Lieberman into the Republican fold.”

Lieberman’s voting record currently puts him in the middle of the Democratic caucus. If he left the party, he would likely move substantially to the right. The political scientist Timothy Nokken has found that “Democrats who become Republicans… start to vote like Republicans” and that House members’ changes in voting behavior are especially pronounced on amendment and procedural votes. Given that the Democrats will repeatedly need Lieberman’s support on cloture votes to end GOP filibusters, their decision seems to be a wise one.

Writing in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg novelizes Obama’s race speech into the act that won him the presidency:

In his Philadelphia speech of March 18, 2008, prompted by the firestorm over his former pastor, he treated the American people as adults capable of complex thinking—as his equals, you might say. But what made that speech special, what enabled it to save his candidacy, was its analytic power. It was not defensive. It did not overcompensate. In its combination of objectivity and empathy, it persuaded Americans of all colors that he understood them. In return, they have voted to make him their President.

The reality is far more mundane:

Most voters following the events [the Wright controversy] say they will make no difference in their vote. Seventy percent say the events will make no difference in their vote. Among those who said it would, 14 percent said it makes them more likely to vote for Obama while an equal number said it makes them less likely to support him.

Nearly a quarter of Democrats say the events have made them more likely to back Obama, while a similar number of Republicans say they are now less likely to do so. Three in four independents say the events make no difference, and the remainder are nearly evenly split between those more likely to support him and those less likely to do so.

The speech may have had a small effect on Obama’s poll numbers, but the data aren’t clear. The primary effect of the race speech was that it ended media’s nonstop coverage of the Wright controversy, which might have done significant damage to Obama’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination if it had continued.

Update 11/14 10:12 AM: As Rob reminds us in comments, Wright returned to the news in late April after controversial appearances at the Detroit NAACP and the National Press Club. Obama then disavowed his comments which largely quieted the storm. At that point, however, Obama had what turned out to be an insurmountable lead.

Despite the election results, it looks like House Republicans are going to shift their leadership in a conservative direction. My friend and colleague Mike Brady, who studies Congress, put together a nice graph illustrating this point (the line represents DW-Nominate estimated ideal points on a left-right ideological dimension):

House GOP Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) are stepping down from their posts and are likely to be replaced by Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.), respectively. In addition, there has been talk of a challenge to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) by either Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who ultimately withdrew his name, or Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), who is still considering it. As you can see, the new leadership entrants are all to the right of the existing leadership and the GOP House median (represented as “minority” on the graph).

I know the South is racially polarized and hostile to Democrats but I was still shocked that Obama only received 10-15 percent of the white vote in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana:

Maybe I’m naïve, but I would have said 25-30 percent.

TNR’s Noam Scheiber has an amusing post on the grammatical similarities between Sarah Palin and Yoda:

[H]ere's something I can't resist–an outtake from Palin's recent publicity tour that the Times highlights today:

Ms. Palin used the term “Sarah-centric” to describe her campaign rallies, arguing that fans were responding to her more as a symbol than as a person. “But not me personally were those cheers for,” she said to Ms. Van Susteren in an interview shown Monday night on Fox News. [emphasis added.]

During the campaign, Maureen Dowd had probably the best description of Palin's convoluted locution, remarking on her sentences' "Yoda-like — 'When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not' — splendor." Even Dowd might be surprised at how Yoda-like that one was.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), who compared President-elect Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler in seemingly record time for a member of Congress, has released a statement that largely defends his words. On the other hand, Broun did semi-apologize for calling Obama a “Marxist” in a local talk radio interview [MP3] — he actually just thinks Obama has “Marxist positions”!

Senator Orrin Hatch has written a NRSC fundraising email that misrepresents Barack Obama’s position on the Fairness Doctrine and defense spending (ellipses in original):

Barack Obama and MoveOn.org need Jim Martin to seize complete control of government.

And to thank them, Martin has promised to rubberstamp Obama’s far-left agenda…

… Liberal activist Supreme Court justices, over $1 trillion in new spending, censorship of conservative talk radio and a crushing 25% cut to our military.

“[C]ensorship of conservative talk radio” is a reference to proposals to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. However, doing so is not part of “Obama’s far-left agenda” — Obama’s campaign specifically disavowed any support for the proposal back in June. Similarly, the proposal to cut 25% from the defense budget comes from Rep. Barney Frank, not Obama. Unless Hatch has evidence to show that Obama supports either proposal, he’s just making things up.

Update 11/18 9:31 PM: In comments, David suggests a possible alternative rationale for the censorship claim:

According to some, their have also been suggestions to censor conservative talk radio by the use of localism complaints. See http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/obama_declares_war_on_conserva.html

It’s worth noting just how quickly Barack Obama is being compared to Adolf Hitler compared to past presidents. Call it the Hitler index of political polarization.

During the campaign, numerous conservative pundits likened Obama to the Nazi dictator, including Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, and Ben Stein. But it’s still shocking to see that a member of Congress, Rep. Paul Broun, has now joined them in this lunatic rhetoric just six days after Obama was elected.

For the purposes of comparison, I did some preliminary Nexis searches looking for equivalent rhetoric targeting Bill Clinton by national-level political figures (i.e. I exclude the various extremists on the Internet, local talk radio, etc.). The earliest I can find is Ross Perot saying this in 1998:

[H]ave there been any other world leaders that had these same mental defects? Yes. People so driven for power, they would do anything to keep it. Hitler had it. Stalin had it. Saddam Hussein has it. Castro’s got it, just to mention a few. Now, surely we can do better than that in the good old U.S.A.

By the end of Clinton’s term in 2000, Republican members of Congress had contracted Hitler fever:

[R]etiring Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-Idaho), commenting on one of Clinton’s national monument designations, said, “This president is engaging in the largest land grab since the invasion of Poland.” Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) went a bit further a couple of weeks ago when Clinton designated Arizona’s Ironwood Forest a national monument. “I would draw a parallel to Hitler,” Shadegg said. “He eroded the will of the German people to resist evil.”

Our favorite is Arkansas Republican Rep. Jay Dickey’s recent fundraising letter reminding supporters they can give him $1,000 for the primary and another $1,000 in the general election campaign. He doesn’t want anyone to “later … say to me that I should have reminded you of the threats,” he said. “Just as people who read Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and then later were surprised at the evils of the 3rd Reich [sic],” Dickey said, “we have the blueprint for what the White House plans to do: defeat me! This is because I not only dared to vote my conscience on the impeachment issue, but dared to do it after a publicly expressed threat that I would lose the election if I did. Are we going to let an astounding abuse of power go unanswered?”

With President Bush, the first direct comparison to Hitler by a member of Congress didn’t come until 2007, when Rep. Keith Ellison compared the Bush administration’s actions after 9/11 to the way the Nazis used the Reichstag fire to seize power:

America’s first Muslim congressman has provoked outrage by apparently comparing President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler and hinting that he might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler’s later seizure of emergency powers.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” Mr Ellison said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

To applause from his audience of 300 members of Atheists for Human Rights, Mr Ellison said he would not accuse the Bush administration of planning 9/11 because “you know, that’s how they put you in the nut-ball box – dismiss you”.

(Senator Dick Durbin also compared the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to that of the Nazi regime in 2005, but he was not directly referring to President Bush or his administration.)

There’s been a lot of dumb post-election commentary, but it’s hard to believe that Patrick Goldstein attempted to determine the significance of Obama’s victory using the box office performance of “Soul Men”:

‘Soul Men’ delivers mixed verdict on Obama victory

Over the past few days, everyone has been offering words of wisdom about what Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory means, especially in terms of it being a seismic political event. But after I got over the emotional experience of seeing America embrace an African American as its president, I found myself wondering: Did this election really represent a huge cultural triumph as well as a political mandate? That was a big reason why I spent Friday night with “Soul Men” producer David Friendly, watching him do what producers often do on their film’s opening night, traveling around to local theaters to see whether their movie has any juice at the box office.

“Soul Men” isn’t just any movie. It’s a comedy starring two prominent African Americans, Sam Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, playing ’70s-era backup singers who reluctantly reunite three decades later to play at a memorial concert for their old frontman. So it was an intriguing cultural test case: Would white audiences come out to watch an R-rated comedy with two black actors engaging in uproarious, but often barbed and profane insult humor? The box-office results provided a simple answer: No.

“Intriguing” wasn’t exactly the word I was looking for. There’s only one appropriate response to “journalism” like this: