Brendan Nyhan

With former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers under consideration as a possible Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, various distortions of his controversial comments about gender are popping back up.

For instance, John Heilemann wrote the following in New York Magazine:

[National Organization for Women president Kim] Gandy told the Huffington Post she had “mixed feelings” about Summers, saying he “doesn’t seem to get” the economic implications of gender-based wage disparities. She cited Summers’s incendiary comments as president of Harvard about women’s intrinsic inaptitude for math and science—the ones that helped get him booted—as a cause for concern.

But as I’ve repeatedly noted, these claims are misleading paraphrases of what Summers actually said. He did not say that women are inherently worse at math and science than men, which is what the phrase “intrinsic inaptitude for math and science” implies. The suggestion he made was that the variability of mathematical and scientific ability may be greater for men, which could mean that there could be more men at the high and low end of the ability distribution:

The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I’m focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it’s not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it’s talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I’m sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they’re all over the map, depends on which test, whether it’s math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn’t be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it’s pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people’s ability to do that. And that’s absolutely right. But I don’t think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it’s something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

It was irresponsible of Summers to engage in this sort of loaded speculation while serving as president of Harvard, but that’s no excuse for reporters and critics getting the facts wrong.

I’ve been wondering whether John McCain poisoned the well for Barack Obama by inspiring the conservative base to loathe him with Clintonesque fervor. As I noted in my last post, Obama has historically high favorable ratings but also has approximately 25% of the country that is “afraid” as a result of his election and strongly disapproves of his presidency (already!).

Here’s more evidence of the bifurcated nature of the new president’s political standing. USAToday.com provides further evidence that Obama’s post-election political image is currently in better standing than any president since 1992:

President-elect Barack Obama comes away from Election Day with a 68% “favorable rating,” the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. That’s up from 62% who said they think favorably of him just before the election. The poll numbers were released just moments ago…

USA TODAY polling editor Jim Norman passes along some historical perspective:

-In 2004, President Bush’s approval rating rose from 51% before the election to 60% afterward.
-In 2000, Bush’s approval went from 55% just before the election to 59% after the Supreme Court ruling in December that put him in the White House…
-In 1996, President Clinton went from 56% pre-election to 60% (those results are based on surveys of registered voters, a slightly different group than the broader one surveyed for today’s results).
-Four years earlier, in 1992, then-governor Clinton went from 51% pre-election to 60% (also polls of registered voters).

(It’s important to remember, however, that 1992 and 2000, the most comparable elections in this sample, were both different than 2008. Clinton faced a strong third party challenge from Ross Perot that kept him well under 50% of the popular vote, and Bush took office after the Florida recount. So the bar for Obama to exceed is fairly low.)

On the other hand, however, the possibility of “Obama hatred” reaching Clinton-era levels of paranoia is real. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) says “we’ve elected a Marxist to be president of the United States” and compared a misinterpreted remark by Obama to actions taken by Adolf Hitler after taking power in pre-WWII Germany:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps “to renew our diplomacy.”

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

Broun said he also believes Obama likely will move to ban gun ownership if he does build a national police force.

Obama has said he respects the Second Amendment right to bear arms and favors “common sense” gun laws. Gun rights advocates interpret that as meaning he’ll at least enact curbs on ownership of assault weapons and concealed weapons. As an Illinois state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on firearms generally.

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

The AP does a good job of fact-checking Broun’s statement but I expect more, not less, of this in the future. It puts the lie to Jon Meachem’s claim on “Meet the Press” yesterday that John McCain ran a “noble” campaign. This sort of rhetoric is McCain’s ugly legacy for the next four years. A certain degree of demonization may have been inevitable, but McCain took the low road for most of the general election.

Update 11/10 10:38 PM: James Rainey writes in the Los Angeles Times about how Rush Limbaugh is also already feeding right-wing paranoia about Obama:

[R]adio’s Biggest Big Man also assures us that the Democrat welcomes “economic chaos” because it gives him “greater opportunity for expanded government.” In a time when the nation calls out for cool leadership and rational discussion, Limbaugh stirs the caldron, a tendency he proved in a particularly grotesque way last week when he accused Obama’s party of plotting a government takeover of 401(k) retirement plans.

“They’re going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is,” Limbaugh woofed. “Trust fund, my rear end.”

A slight problem with Limbaugh’s report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing.

The proposal, in fact, emanated from a single economist, one of many experts testifying to a congressional committee.

The president-elect has thus far shown as much interest in taking over your 401(k) as he has in moving the capital to Nairobi. (If you look hard, you might find that one somewhere out there in the blogosphere, too.)

To broadcast such a report — so drained of context as to constitute a lie — would be a shameless act at any time. But Limbaugh needlessly stirred the fears of the millions he holds in his thrall — making the 401(k) thievery sound like nearly a done deal. Shameless.

Like this blogger at Newsbusters.org, I cringed when Obama transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett said on “Meet the Press” that Obama is “prepared to … begin to rule day one”:

[G]iven, really, the daunting challenges that we face, it’s important that President-elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.

In a democracy, the president doesn’t “rule.” It’s just a poor choice of words, but one with deep symbolic meaning.

I want to clarify my claim last night that Republicans in Congress will not dramatically shift their voting patterns in response to a perceived Obama mandate. A friend correctly pointed out to me by email that a mandate response isn’t necessary for Obama to change the legislative status quo. What mattters is the configuration of the veto and filibuster pivots in Congress.

The simplest way to understand what legislation gets enacted is a one-dimensional model popularized by Keith Krehbiel, David W. Brady, and Craig Volden. As I’ve noted before, we can imagine a single left-right dimension of ideology with all the members of Congress and the president represented as points on that dimension. The gridlock zone represents the ideological range defined by the filibuster and the veto.

We can use this simple model to illustrate the effect of the 2008 election. In the current Congress, the gridlock zone is the space between the 41st most liberal senator (the filibuster pivot) and the 67th most liberal senator and 290th most liberal House member (the veto pivots). Assume that we can also locate the ideological content of policies on this dimension. We can show that any status quo policies in that range cannot be altered — a move to the right will be blocked by the filibuster pivot, and a move to the left will be blocked by a presidential veto that the veto pivots will not override.

In the next Congress, two things will happen. First, the configuration of the zone flips. Now Obama is to the left of the gridlock zone rather than to the right. As a result, the zone runs from the 33rd most liberal senator and the 145th most liberal House member (the veto pivots) to the 59th most liberal senator (the filibuster pivot). Second, the composition of Congress has shifted to the left as a result of the defeat of moderate Republicans and the election of more Democrats. As such, the the 33rd most liberal senator, the 145th most liberal House member, and the 59th most liberal senator are likely be to the left of their counterparts in the current Congress.

To illustrate, the previous veto pivots on policy shifts to the left were (approximately) Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Joseph Knollenberg (R-MI). These members (or close equivalents) could block any proposal to the left of their preferred point on the ideological spectrum by supporting a Bush veto that would therefore not be overriden.

In the next Congress, however, the relevant constraint will be the 59th most liberal senator. Assuming that new Democratic senators will be to the left of Nebraska’s Ben Nelson (the most conservative Senate Democrat), the filibuster pivot will be Nelson if Democrats win two of three outstanding seats in the Senate, Olympia Snowe (R-ME) if Democrats win one, or Susan Collins (R-ME) if Democrats win no additional seats. Any status quo policy located between Nelson and Alexander can now be moved far enough to the left to make Nelson indifferent between the status quo and the current policy.

This shift frees up S-CHIP expansion and other bills Bush vetoed as well as issues such as health care and energy that are key priorities for Obama. And if Democrats use the reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster on health care, the relevant constraint shifts all the way to the 50th most liberal senator (since Biden can break the tie). Obama may be able to pass a great deal of important legislation without a perceived mandate.

Update 11/10 2:01 PM: Rob correctly points out in comments that Bush’s stem cell policy can be reversed by executive order, so I’ve removed it from the list of policies that can now pass Congress (Bush vetoed a bill that would have overturned his executive order).

I’ve been too sick and busy with teaching and research to try to fact-check all the election interpretations out there, so let me recommend the excellent “Truths and Myths about the 2008 Election” series by John Sides of GW and The Monkey Cage, which distills the relevant political science for a general audience:

1. The Fundamentals Mattered
2. OMG THE BRADLEY EFFECT OMG THE BRADLEY EFFECT OMG!
3. Party Loyalty Matters
4. There Is No Realignment
5. Be Very Careful When Talking About a “Mandate”

Two other important points:

1. Phil Klinkner on why it’s doesn’t appear that John McCain lost because of the economic crisis (as many Republicans and journalists have suggested).
2. Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and others have done good work debunking hype that group X was the key to the election because it swung a few points toward Obama. The relevant question is whether the group swung more toward Obama than the national swing. Similarly, as Andrew Gelman showed, all the hype about results in specific states obscures the fact that Obama’s vote percentage was a relatively uniform swing from John Kerry’s totals in 2004.

The mandate debate that Sides covers above is particularly relevant since I’ve blogged so much on the subject. Though liberals are claiming that Obama has a mandate as I predicted (the Campaign for America’s Future tried to claim one before the election even took place), prominent Republicans like former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow and conservative pundits like Robert Novak are pushing back. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the results were “not a mandate for any political party or any ideology.” (DNC chair Howard Dean and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also sought to downplay expectations.) Given the relevant political science on the question, which finds that mandate effects in legislative voting require a near-unanimous consensus among elites, it’s almost impossible to imagine Obama getting unusual levels of Republican support in Congress during his first months in office (unlike, say, Reagan in 1981 or the GOP in 1995).

Things have deteriorated pretty far in America when the Wall Street Journal editorial page has to remind fellow conservatives that “New Jersey is part of America too”:

Our advice would be that [Alaska govenror Sarah Palin] also broaden her appeal beyond the politics of cultural division. One unfortunate campaign decision was to turn Mrs. Palin’s initial response to press criticism into a consistent theme. The Governor’s stump speech took on an us-versus-them cast, framing the election as a battle between the “real America” and blue-state elites. Hard as it may be to believe, New Jersey is part of America too.

One of the most important questions confronting Barack Obama is how he will be treated by Republicans in Congress and the electorate after the afterglow of his victory fades.

During the campaign, John McCain riled up the base to think that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer who “doesn’t put country first.” McCain tried to back away from that position during his concession speech, which was generous and conciliatory, but ended up having to quiet his supporters, who booed Obama. The mood at GOP campaign rallies this fall suggests that McCain unleashed something he could not control.

As Kevin Drum wrote during the campaign, “[t]he danger is that John McCain is setting us up for a repeat of the 90s” in which conservatives “treat President Obama as not just an opposition leader, but as a virtual enemy of the state, as they did with Bill Clinton.” Paul Krugman expressed similar fears and predicted that the treatment of Obama “will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years.”

To understand what happened to Clinton, it’s important to note that he came into office with relatively low approval among opposition party identifiers compared with other presidents in the contemporary era:

Partly as a result, Clinton never had a presidential “honeymoon,” Republicans in Congress sought to undermine his agenda from the beginning (especially health care), and incessantly promoted scandal allegations like the Whitewater affair.

Will the Republican base and conservatives in Congress follow McCain’s lead in their treatment of Obama? It’s an important question with implications that seem to generalize beyond Clinton. For instance, my research on presidential scandal suggests that low opposition approval is an important predictor of increased presidential vulnerability to scandal in the contemporary era (1977-2006).

The evidence we have thus far suggests that Obama may face a similarly hostile GOP (though it’s obviously very early). First, there is a hardcore group of conservatives who strongly dislike Obama and are unlikely to view his administration with an open mind. A post-election USA Today/Gallup poll found that 27% of Americans and 56% of McCain voters are “afraid” as a result of Obama’s election — a response that is directly consistent with McCain’s campaign rhetoric. Similarly, 26% of Americans were found to strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance as president-elect in a Rasmussen Reports poll (though he hasn’t even taken office yet!).

The outrage machine is likely to start ginning up these voters very soon. This is the banner ad that I saw on Drudge the day after the election:

And here’s one I saw today:

The forces in contemporary politics that push us toward hyper-partisan confrontation from day one are very, very strong. Obama may be their next victim.

Update 11/10 9:39 AM: Here’s a similar poll result from Gallup, which finds that Obama’s favorability ratings are currently 70% favorable, 25% unfavorable, which is up from 61% favorable in the Nov. 1-3 poll. The question is how soon the Republicans and GOP-leaning independents will shift into negative views of Obama, which will largely depend on how soon conservative elites start criticizing him. He does start from a strong position — Gallup notes that the 61% favorable rating was the highest for a presidential candidate in the 1992-2008 period.

In a New York Times op-ed today, Ramesh Ponnuru claims that “Mr. McCain’s plans would have cut taxes more than Mr. Obama’s for a lot of middle-class families, but Republicans rarely bothered to point that out.” However, the Tax Policy Center found that Obama would have cut taxes more than McCain for the second, third, and fourth quintiles of the income distribution (PDF):

It is true that McCain would cut taxes more than Obama for the 80th to 90th percentile ($111,645-$160,972), which in certain high-income areas like Manhattan might be considered “middle class.” However, in terms of the national income distribution, those people are very well-off. Ponnuru’s statement is misleading as a general description of reality.

Update 11/8 3:55 PM: Ponnuru responded yesterday on The Corner, National Review Online’s group blog (see also the comment by AEI’s Andrew Biggs):

I’m not sure, though, that [the Tax Policy Center] counted McCain’s refundable health-care tax credit, which was pretty progressive, for the purpose of that computation. Based on the discussion in that section of the report, it sounds as though it didn’t. Also, as Rich Lowry pointed out, the New York Times gave many examples of middle-class families who would fare better under the McCain plan. Not all, by any means: Families with kids in college would often have done better under the Obama plan. But enough to make my claim neither untrue nor misleading.

If you read Ponnuru’s statement in context, however, his wording suggests that he was treating tax policy and health care policy as separate issues (my criticism above was based on that interpretation):

Yes, Mr. McCain’s plans would have cut taxes more than Mr. Obama’s for a lot of middle-class families, but Republicans rarely bothered to point that out. Mr. McCain’s campaign smartly promised to double the tax exemption for children, but the candidate seemed unfamiliar with the idea, repeatedly describing it incorrectly. Likewise, he had an innovative health care plan, but he rarely explained how it would help the average voter.

Is Ponnuru right about the combined distributional effects? He doesn’t mention that McCain’s tax credit is offset for many families by removing the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance. Still, if we consider the same Tax Policy Center analysis that I cited above and combine the distributional estimates for the candidates’ tax and health care plans (which includes direct subsidies under Obama’s plan), the percentage change in 2009 after-tax income appears to favor Obama for the lowest two quintiles and McCain for the highest three. The key point, though, is that McCain’s plan would have shifted millions of people into the individual insurance market — something most health care experts find highly problematic. Also, the value of McCain’s tax credit is not indexed to inflation and would therefore decline in value over time.

Time for another dispatch on the bizarre epistemology of campaign journalism. As I noted yesterday, the conventions of campaign journalism require journalists to obsess over the twists and turns of the presidential horse race and to ignore the fact that its outcome is highly predictable. But everything changes after Election Day. For instance, CNN.com’s retrospective blithely asserts that McCain’s campaign was “always a long shot”:

What would have been his greatest political comeback — to seize the White House — proved to be too difficult. A Republican win in what is being seen as a “Democratic year” was always a long shot.

Whoever was the GOP nominee was going to have to fight against the legacy of the previous eight years of a Republican president who became highly unpopular because of the Iraq war, administration gaffes such as the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and what turned from a credit crunch into a global economic crisis.

The Arizona senator even managed to make the race appear competitive, soaring in the polls on the back of a polished convention and popular VP pick, Gov. Sarah Palin. But he made mistakes, too. Combined with the electorate’s disenchantment with his party, it ensured defeat.

Did CNN let its viewers know that McCain’s campaign was “always a long shot”? Or did it relentlessly hype the horse race? I don’t watch a lot of cable news, but I think we all know the answer.

The irony, of course, is that CNN would have constructed a similar narrative concluding that a McCain victory was inevitable had he won. See the anecdotes about Newsweek’s post-election packages from Larry Bartels and Matthew Yglesias that I cited last month. Reporters have an amazing ability to predict the past.

PS Memo to CNN: Sarah Palin was not “popular” by the end of the campaign.

The conventional wisdom tends to enshrine certain “lessons” from each election cycle. Here are two that I hope get remembered:

1. Pick a qualified running mate. It’s difficult to tell if the choice of Sarah Palin actually hurt John McCain — despite her bad poll numbers, he did about as well as political science models expect. But for the sake of the country, I hope future nominees of both parties don’t take risks like that in the future.

2. Don’t smear your political opponents. After Michelle Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and liberal members of Congress are anti-American, more than one million dollars in campaign donations poured into her opponent’s campaign, making the race competitive. Though Bachmann ultimately pulled out a narrow victory, the possibility of a flood of online dollars is going to make incumbents nationwide think twice about mouthing off.