Brendan Nyhan

George Lakoff: False prophet (part II)

Here's TNR's Noam Scheiber adding to the long list of what's wrong with using George Lakoff as a message guru. The simple fact is that he doesn't really know what he's talking about:

Yet, by and large, once he strayed from the broader point about the role of values, Lakoff's advice in these situations was naive. An aide to Nancy Pelosi told me, for example, that Lakoff advised Democratic House members last December to oppose Social Security privatization by emphasizing the biblical obligation to honor one's parents. On one level, it made sense to appeal to values rather than to focus on the benefit cuts that privatization would entail, which could etch the image of tax-and-spend liberalism further into voters' minds. The problem was the specific values Lakoff chose to highlight. Pollster Guy Molyneux has conducted extensive survey research on attitudes toward entitlement spending. He says that, when it comes to values, voters respond much better to arguments based on fairness--for example, that they earned their Social Security benefits by working hard and paying into the system all their lives--than to arguments based on obligations to fellow citizens. That's why, even though Social Security acts largely as a social insurance program, FDR designed it to look like a private insurance plan, in which your benefits reflect your contributions.

Likewise, on the dividend tax cut, the point Lakoff emphasized most strongly to Democrats was the importance of not calling the proposal "tax relief." "They just bought into the [frame] of the other side," he harrumphs, still incredulous. "I said, 'The alternative is taxation as some sort of investment.'" But the "tax relief" metaphor resonates not simply because Republicans have successfully framed taxes as a punitive burden. It resonates because Americans have always had a deep suspicion of the government's power to tax, dating back to the founding of the republic. "Not using the phrase doesn't make people like taxes," says one former Senate aide, who rolled his eyes at Lakoff's prescriptions. "People have never liked taxes." Lakoff responds by suggesting that U.S. history supports more than one interpretation. For every tax rebellion, there is another example of citizens working together for the common good--the barn-raising of frontier lore. But this argument doesn't explain why tax rates in the United States have historically been so much lower than in, say, Scandinavia.

Other Lakoff recommendations have been even more off-base. A second Senate aide points to another Lakoff presentation last year. During the question-and-answer session that followed, the senators began pressing Lakoff for a single turn of phrase that would capture all the values reflected in the party's many positions. Lakoff hesitated a moment, then suggested, "Come home, America." The aide's jaw dropped. "I sort of said, 'What? Come home, America? That was the theme of the McGovern campaign in 1972. I don't think that's going to work.'" (Lakoff doesn't recall the specific phrase, but says it would have been only one of several he suggested in the course of the discussion.)

McCrery's ridiculous Social Security jargon

I'll see your mumbo, and raise you a jumbo!

Rep. Jim McCrery is challenging the White House in the race to see who can use the most engineered language possible on Social Security:

One of the sharpest exchanges came when Representative Jim McCrery complained about the Democrats' repeated use of the term "privatization" to describe the president's plan.

"Democrats on the panel use it ad nauseam," said Mr. McCrery, the visibly angry Louisiana Republican who heads the subcommittee on Social Security. "Nobody is talking about privatizing Social Security. Get over it."

Mr. McCrery also objected to the Democrats' characterization of "progressive indexation," another component of the Bush plan, which would reduce the growth in benefits for all but the poorest retirees, based on a sliding income scale.

"It's not means-testing," Mr. McCrery said. "It's further income-relating the benefit."

Democrats on the panel began to laugh. Mr. McCrery shot back: "There's two different things. I mean, you either know it or you don't."

Democrats put tactics over strategy... again

Via Rush & Molloy, Bill Clinton characteristically focuses on "tactics" as the way to defeat Republicans:

"The guy [Max Cleland] left half his body in Vietnam," he said. "They're in the business to beat us. When they come out after you, it is a contact sport.

"Get better tactics. Don't wuss around. And quit saying, 'They're so mean and vicious.' They only do it because it works. When they don't do it anymore, we can go back to a more civilized way of doing business."

This is the same mistake Bill Clinton frequently made during his presidency (according to John F. Harris, Dick Morris decided that Clinton "was masterful at tactical maneuvers, but only average as a strategic thinker"). It's the same mistake John Kerry made. And it's the same mistake Democrats are making today as they try to mitigate voter concerns about their weakness on national defense and values issues without making fundamental changes in what they stand for.

If there's one lesson that George W. Bush's presidency teaches us, it's that tactics don't win; strategy does. Bush may lose a news cycle, but the long-run strategic thinking of Karl Rove has consistently paid off, while the short-term tactical maneuvers of Democrats almost never have. How Clinton has still failed to grasp this, I don't know. But Democrats won't beat back Republican attacks on them as weak on defense until they're no longer weak on defense. There are no tactical solutions to this problem.

Media Research Center: Relativist hacks

Media Matters points out another ridiculous study by the so-called watchdogs at the Media Research Center:

Since Election Day, network reporters branded politicians or groups as "conservative" 395 times, compared to 59 "liberal" labels, a greater than six-to-one disparity... MRC analysts used the Nexis database to examine each use of "liberal" and "conservative" on ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programs from November 3 through May 2. We rejected labels that weren' political (a "conservative investment") or outside the U.S. context (all those labels of Pope Benedict XVI, for example). We also excluded labels applied by a news source rather than the network reporter.

As Media Matters notes, this methodology is screamingly incoherent:

The basic premise of this "study" -- that if there are more mentions of the word "conservative" than the word "liberal" in a given period, then the news must be "biased" against conservatives -- is so ridiculous that a fourth-grader could pierce its logic.

If precisely the same number of actual conservatives and liberals had been discussed in the news, and conservatives had been identified as such while liberals hadn't, the MRC might have a legitimate gripe (though even this criticism would presume, as the MRC seems to, that "conservative" and "liberal" are inherently derogatory terms). But the real reason there are more mentions of "conservatives" than "liberals" is obvious: there has been more news about conservatives.

An additional reason to believe that MRC's "study" is wrong: when Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, checked the claim that conservatives are labelled as such more often than liberals in a methodologically sound fashion, he found that liberals were labeled as such more often than conservatives, not less.

MM also flags a separate MRC study that illustrates the deep relativism of the contemporary conservative movement. It states:

This study of 125 news stories on Social Security between Nov. 15, 2004, and March 15, 2005, found four out of the five major networks biased toward liberal talking points. CBS and CNN had almost three times as many liberal stories as conservative. Overall, liberal talking points outweighed conservative ones by a margin of 2 to 1. Reporters favored extreme examples that made liberal points, while failing to explain key economic terms and concepts that would inform the debate.

But as MM argues:

A look at the supporting evidence shows the presumption that drives this "study" is the same that underlies virtually all of the MRC's work: Any news story not dominated by unadulterated Republican spin is, by definition, a case of "liberal bias."

If this is your starting point, it is not hard to find examples that support your pre-determined conclusion. If its "study" of Social Security coverage is any indication, the MRC apparently believes that even any fact that does not coincide with Republican spin constitutes a "liberal talking point" and proof of "bias."

For instance, in the study, MRC coded any mention of the transition costs of President Bush's plan for private investment accounts as a "liberal talking point." The flip side of this contention is that, according to the MRC, when a news organization fails to report Republican spin as fact, it has shown bias. For instance, the report cited the following as an alleged example of bias: "On Feb. 12's 'Evening News,' CBS's Russ Mitchell said, 'Mr. Bush said he's open to any good idea to fix a system he claims is heading for bankruptcy' (emphasis added)." CBS' attribution of the bankruptcy argument as a claim of Bush's and not as simple fact, according to the MRC, shows CBS' bias. Of course, the idea that Social Security will be "bankrupt" is not merely a point of contention, it is highly misleading -- even under the pessimistic projections of the Social Security trustees, the system will not go broke (it will be able to pay, at a minimum, between 70 and 80 percent of promised benefits, even if nothing is done to change it). Anything less than uncritical Republican spin, even when that spin is clearly misleading, constitutes "liberal bias" as far as the MRC is concerned.

The MRC looked for conservative arguments in favor of Social Security privatization, then claimed that the absence of those arguments from news reports constitutes bias. The study quoted conservative activist Stephen Moore, an advocate of privatization, to contend that "personal accounts would reduce the burden on the government and eventually create surpluses rather than more debt. But in unbalanced stories, this point was absent." In fact, even the Bush administration has declined to endorse this claim; the administration has admitted that private accounts will do nothing to address Social Security's long-term solvency. Moore is apparently assuming spectacular future stock market gains to make his prediction. But even if you agree with Moore, his is a highly contested, speculative argument. The MRC's claim that not including it in a news report makes that report "unbalanced" exposes the assumptions that make its "study" so absurd.

(For more, see this Spinsanity column on FAIR and MRC.)

Mary Matalin's MTP hackery

Brian Montopoli of CJR Daily dissects some especially ridiculous spin from Mary Matalin on Meet the Press, and does a nice job drawing out its larger implications:

After Russert brought up Pat Robertson's claim that the federal judiciary is a greater threat than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings," he showed a MoveOn.org ad calling on Bill Frist and Tom DeLay to repudiate Robertson's words. He then asked Matalin, "Has this gone too far?" Here's the subsequent exchange:

Matalin: It's demagoguery. That's sheer demagoguery.

Russert: Well, you don't agree with Pat Robertson.

Matalin: I think that was an injudicious thing to say, but that the secular left has behaved imperialistically -- there's no other word for it. They have subverted the democratic process by taking their issues to the judiciary. What the so-called religious right has done has taken their petition and their concerns into the democratic process, into the public square. They organize and they try to affect legislation, as opposed to being the subverted process of democracy which is what the secular left does.

This is all demagoguery. There is a secular left. There is a religious right. It is -- the way in which the secular left overestimates its uniformity is funny. They're not -- there's not just Christian conservatives. There [are] a lot of the people who are concerned about traditional values and in politics and in the public square. There are lots of Jews, there are a lot of conservative Muslims. There are -- it's ecumenical. There's Catholics. It's across the board. There is not a uniformity. There's lots of pluralism and they're part of the democratic process. And this is just demagoguery on the parts of these left-wing extremists.

Got it? Pat Robertson's assertion that federal judges are a greater danger than terrorists was "an injudicious thing to say," but anyone who raises a hand in protest to that statement is a "left-wing extremist" exercising "demagoguery." Rhetorical backbends don't get much more twisted than that.

Why, jaded readers might wonder, does this particular abomination so exercise us? After all, there are any number of talking heads out there willing to lie and spin with reckless abandon and then exhibit righteous indignation toward anyone who expresses disagreement -- and any number of talk shows eager to roll out the red carpet for same.

But Matalin, and "Meet the Press" itself, deserve to be singled out because they are thought to represent the best of political dialogue: a respected political operative who has worked in high places being grilled on the most revered political talk show in America. If anyone still thinks that the carnival barkers are confined to cable shoutfests while serious political dialogue endures elsewhere, last weekend's display should be enough to put that fleeting hope to rest once and for all.

(Unnecessary disclosure: Bryan Keefer, who I used to work with on Spinsanity, is assistant managing editor of CJR Daily.)

Tomorrow's anti-Hillary agitprop today

I just received a fundraising solicitation from the RNC with this quote from Hillary Clinton on the envelope, at the top of the letter, and in the body of the letter: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

It's presented with no context in the first two cases. And in the body of the letter, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman writes:

As you decide how much to send I want you to take to heart the words of New York Senator Hillary Clinton when she said, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

These words of warning have profound and troubling implications for all Americans.

President Reagan frequently reminded us that in America the government works for us. The leaders of the Democrats see it the other way around.

If the liberal Democrats win in 2006, we can expect massive tax and spending increases and a total defeat of the Bush agenda.

Now, I'm no Hillary fan and don't like the language she used, but the RNC is taking the quote at least partially out of context. It comes from a speech Hillary gave in San Francisco last year, which the AP reported as follows:

Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters -- some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend -- to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress.

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

In short, she was talking specifically to the rich donors who were her audience, and she was advocating the repeal of tax cuts, not the confiscation of property. But knowing the way the media echo chamber works, I'm sure the out-of-context version will take on a life of its own soon enough.

Washington Monthly highlights

The latest issue of the Washington Monthly has a creative set of policy recommendations for governors planning to run for the White House. Well worth a read.

It also has a decent article on the declining political fortunes of Governor Schwarzanegger, who is discovering that trying to go it alone in the two-party system isn't as easy as it seems. This fantastic caricature, which isn't in the online version of the article, sums it all up:

John Lott: Please seek help

Via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, I see that the indefatigable Tim Lambert has caught John Lott posting yet another fraudulent review of his own work under a pseudonym. According to Lambert, Lott has now posted eighteen anonymous five-star reviews of his own books. Unbelievable and sad.

What is Jeff Greenfield talking about? (Clinton haircut edition)

In a Washington Monthly review of The Survivor by John F. Harris, Jeff Greenfield dredges up some Clinton-era propaganda:

Reading The Survivor is to be reminded of the sheer chaos that at times seemed to swamp the White House, from the superficial (sloppy dress,"boxers or briefs?," chronic tardiness, all-night pizza pig-outs) to the problematic (a $200 haircut on Air Force One, the Whitewater and travel office dustups) to the tragic (the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, one of Hillary Clinton's closest friends).

In fact, the $200 price for the haircut Clinton received on Air Force One is, like much of the story, undocumented or untrue. No one knows how much Clinton paid; the $200 figure -- Christophe's usual rate -- became attached to the story as if it were fact. (And, contrary to widespread belief, the haircut did not tie up air traffic at LAX.)

Greenfield should know better. But then again, if media elites actually cared about the facts, many Clinton-era urban legends would not still be conventional wisdom.

What is Tom McMahon talking about? (Nuclear option edition)

Tom McMahon, the executive director of the DNC, just sent out an anti-nuclear option email to supporters that includes this passage:

[Republicans are] trying to seize absolute control over all three branches of government -- and they will do anything to get what they want. In one move they will try to simultaneously crush all dissent in the Senate and destroy the bedrock democratic principle of a fair and independent judiciary.

Time to restate the obvious: The nuclear option does not give Republicans absolute control of the Senate, it will not "crush all dissent in the Senate," and it will not destroy the "principle of a fair and independent judiciary." I don't support the nuclear option, but this hysterical, over-the-top rhetoric makes Democrats look foolish. Losing the right to filibuster judicial nominees does not mean you can't be an active opposition that can exercise its powers of dissent in all kinds of ways. It just means you can't require a supermajority to approve a nomination. There's a difference.

(Previous posts on Tom McMahon and the nuclear option.)

A peek into the paranoid liberal psyche

"Avedon," a guest blogger at Eschaton, displays the classic reasoning of the conspiracy-minded:

One reason I don't think it's at all paranoid to suspect that the Republicans have deliberately taken over the voting system in order to cheat is that they keep doing things that don't otherwise make sense. There's a rather long list of things you just wouldn't expect them to think they could get away with unless they really thought they could control the ballot box, because otherwise they would have to expect that the public would kick enough of them out to not only end some political careers but also make impeachment - and prison - a distinct possibility.

And then there's this nuclear option thing - why would they be willing to remove any possibility of stopping majority party initiatives unless they were absolutely sure that they could never become the minority party again?

Conservatives have made good use of the filibuster over the years, on judicial nominations and a lot of other things. Are they absolutely certain no one will wake up and get rid of them? Or are they just sure that how we vote isn't going to matter?

Give me a break -- has anyone heard of Occam's Razor? Here's a simpler explanation: the GOP is overconfident about how long they're going to be in the majority. It's sad that this sort of nonsense is appearing on one of the most popular liberal blogs.

Joe Klein takes a stand against Clinton/Bush dominance

Time's Joe Klein joins my call to oppose any Clinton or Bush running for president in 2008:

What's more, I suspect there would be innate and appropriate populist resistance to this slouch toward monarchial democracy [if Hillary runs for president in 2008]. There is something fundamentally un-American -- and very European -- about the Clintons and the Bushes trading the office every eight years, with stale, familiar corps of retainers, supporters and enemies. Bill Clinton was a good President. Hillary Clinton is a good Senator. But enough already. (And that goes for you too, Jeb.)

A Bush or Dole has been on every Republican ticket since 1976, and if Hillary is chosen by the Democrats in 2008, that would mean that Clintons would have been three of the party's last five nominees. This is not an aristocracy -- our presidential politics need fresh blood.

The David Brooks/John Tierney echo chamber

Media Matters nails a couple of uncanny similarities in David Brooks' and John Tierney's columns:

Brooks on President Bush's Social Security proposal, May 8: Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. ... Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff.

Tierney on President Bush's Social Security proposal, April 30: Democrats have good reason to be aghast at President Bush's new proposal for Social Security. Someone has finally called their bluff.

Brooks on thin people dying sooner, April 24: People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.

I can't tell you how happy this makes me. Since I read about this report a few days ago, I haven't been able to stop grinning.

Tierney on thin people dying sooner, April 23: For those of us lacking six-pack abs, this week's report that the overweight live longer is the greatest medical news in history.

And here's Kevin Drum on another parallel set of passages:

Here's Tierney on Saturday writing about George Bush's Social Security plan:

Faced with the grim math, President Bush offered a progressive compromise last week to Democrats: protect the poor while moderating the growth of benefits for higher-income workers. Democrats refused to bite, denouncing his "cuts" without offering a plan of their own, and members of both parties wondered why any politician would jeopardize his party's chances in 2006 by tackling an unpleasant future problem.

And here's Brooks on Sunday:

By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty....So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not.

This is what happens when liberal media tastes dictate the selection of "acceptable" conservatives -- you get two libertarian-leaning non-evangelicals who focus on humorous pop psychology/sociology instead of ideology or policy and thus have similar takes on most issues. The problem is that they've both turned out to be pretty useless on the op-ed page; their columns aren't funny or interesting, and neither has displayed any particular insight into policy or politics. At least Paul Krugman has a point of view and some policy expertise. Give me Bill Kristol!

When inappropriate metaphors attack! (Sarah Vowell edition)

Via Wonkette, here's Sarah Vowell on why she didn't turn down her role in The Incredibles:

[Pixar is] the best at what they do, the most universally culturally revered. It's like if Nelson Mandela showed up asking for your help to fight racism. Maybe fighting racism isn't normally your thing. Maybe you're more of an armchair racism hater. But if Mandela was standing at your door asking you to get on the bus, you'd just start putting on your shoes, right?'

What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (Newspaper editorials edition)

Eric Alterman is dead-on about this:

Michael Kinsley begins his column, here, "In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal." Hey Michael, name one "nearly insane far-left" newspaper editorial page in the United States or has it escaped your notice that you are just about the most liberal editorial page editor in the United States?

He's liberal, but he denounces "nearly insane far-left" newspaper editorials even if they don't exist! How counter-intuitive is that!

(Past entries in the Kinsley files are here and here.)

Larry Bartels on democratic accountability

Larry Bartels is a professor of political science at Princeton who recently came and gave a talk here at Duke. He's working on a very interesting series of papers that are definitely worth a read.

"Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution (PDF) shows that, since World War II, Democratic presidents have consistently produced greater GDP growth, lower unemployment, and lower inequality than Republican presidents (without producing substantially higer inflation). The differences are remarkable and stand up to virtually every challenge that can be thrown at them (outliers, technology, etc.).

So why have Republicans done so well in presidential elections since 1968? Bartels suggests that the answer is a remarkable difference in economic performance during election years. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Democrats have only managed to deliver 1% growth in pre-tax income on average, while Republicans have delivered about 3%.

A second paper (PDF) expands on this point, showing that voters tend to make their choices based on economic performance in the months before re-election, not on performance over the president's term as a whole.

Finally, his well-known paper "Homer Gets a Tax Cut" (PDF) presents a similarly grim finding: voters largely fail to connect their concerns about growing inequality to the issue of estate tax repeal, and even those who do make the connection still tend to support getting rid of it.

These are depressing but important findings that deserve serious attention from every student of democracy.

Chait and Weisberg on the new conservatism

Jon Chait and Jacob Weisberg have a nice pair of articles on the hollowness of the so-called conservatism practiced under President Bush and the current Republican leadership in Congress.

Here's Chait:

The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways that DeLay and Abramoff became central to the conservative movement in Washington. To define big-government conservatism as a form of pragmatism or as the promotion of virtue is to miss its fundamentally corrupt nature. In truth, the most accurate definition -- that is, the definition that explains the broadest scope of Bush's big-government initiatives -- is far less edifying: Big government conservatism consists of initiatives that benefit economic elites without using free-market mechanisms.

...Bush's big-government conservatism represents the coming to fruition of a Republican strategy ten years in the making. When the GOP took control of Congress after the 1994 elections, it undertook an ironclad alliance with the business lobbyists of K Street. The most famous aspect of this alliance was the K Street Strategy, the successful Republican campaign to force business donors to abandon their traditional bipartisanship and instead hire from and donate to the Republican Party exclusively.

The less well-known, but far more important, aspect of the GOP-K Street alliance revolved around policy. By steering government largesse toward their own donors, Republicans could create a self-perpetuating money machine. Industries whose profitability relies on government largesse -- and especially those that depend on favors that only Republicans support -- will naturally invest some of those profits back into the political party that provides them.

And here's Weisberg:

In this, the third year that Republicans have controlled everything, a variation on the old interest-group liberalism has emerged as the new governing philosophy. One might have expected that once in command, conservative politicians would work to further reduce Washington's power and bury the model of special-interest-driven government expansion for good. But one would have been wrong. Instead, Republicans have gleefully taken possession of the old liberal spoils system and converted it to their own purposes. The result is the curious governing philosophy of interest-group conservatism: the expansion and exploitation of government by people who profess to dislike it.

...Today the dominant conservative interests form a rival constellation: corporations, especially in the energy and military contracting sectors, evangelical Christians, wealthy investors, gun owners, and the conservative media. In the daily business of Washington, the old pattern remains in place, only with the substitution of these new supplicants and their new benefactors in the GOP. As in the old days, lobbyists work the halls of Congress and the regulatory agencies, functioning like carpenter ants to build a federal government ever bigger in size and more intrusive in scope.

Indeed. And as Weisberg points out, gerrymandering will make it nearly impossible to dislodge Republican control of Congress until at least 2012, which means that the decadence will continue for some time to come.

Will Hillary escape a pledge not to run for president?

A few weeks I asked why Hillary Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate. I think she's going to get boxed in to making a pledge not to run for president in 2008 that could not be broken without serious damage to her credibility.

Well, it turns out that the media is already polling this, and it's clear that New Yorkers want her to make a pledge:

A strong majority of New Yorkers want Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to commit to serving a full six-year term if she wins re-election next year, according to a poll released yesterday.

Clinton -- who is widely believed to be planning on running for president in 2008 -- made that pledge when she first won office in 2000, but she hasn't done the same for her possible second term in the Senate, which would continue to 2012.

The Quinnipiac University poll found 60 percent of those questioned said Clinton should promise to serve out her full second term, and it revealed a bare majority of voters -- 51-41 percent -- don't want her to run for president in 2008.

Even 65 percent of Democrats said she should pledge to serve six years if she's re-elected.

But at an awards dinner at the Waldorf last night, Clinton wouldn't make the pledge, refusing to reveal her political plans beyond 2006.

"I'm focused on winning re-election. That's my goal," she said.

The calculation she's presumably making is that she can probably still win without a pledge given her current strength in the polls, which is even greater than I thought (though it's still very early):

[T]he former first lady trounces all would-be GOP Senate challengers, according to the poll. She beats Gov. Pataki, 60-32 percent; Westchester County DA Jeanine Pirro, 62-27; former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, 63-26; and Ed Cox, son-in-law of the late President Richard Nixon, 63-25.

Cox -- a Manhattan lawyer who some in the survey confused with Ed Koch -- has told GOP leaders that he is interested in running against Clinton, but the others have publicly or privately ruled it out.

The poll, which surveyed 1,191 registered voters from April 28 to May 2, found Clinton with a strong approval rating -- 63 percent, while only 28 percent disapproved.

Sixty-seven percent of voters -- including 36 percent of Republicans -- said the former first lady deserved re-election.

But even if she gets away without making a pledge, two years of slippery rhetoric and question-dodging will reinforce the meta-narrative that she is a dishonest, opportunistic politician like her husband, particularly as the media picks up on the parallels to him breaking his pledge to serve out his final term as governor of Arkansas. And if that meta-narrative shapes media coverage in 2007-2008, she has no chance in the general election.

So we're back to same question -- why run for re-election in 2006 if she wants to run for president in 2008? If she wants to run in '08, she shouldn't run for re-election to the Senate. And if she doesn't want to run for president, she should pledge not to do so, which would make her re-election a slam dunk. This vacillating stance is going to hurt her chances of achieving either objective.

What is Michael Kinsley talking about? (George Bush edition)

Michael Kinsley is a brilliant political commentator, but his tired obsession with being counter-intuitive, which dominated his tenure at The New Republic and has since ruined Slate (see here and here), has again reared its ugly head.

His latest column, which I was alerted to by Bob Somerby, makes the counterintuitive case for Bush's honesty during his press conference:

Above all, Bush was honest and even courageous about Social Security. Social Security is entirely about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. As Bush has discovered in the past few months, there are no shadows to hide in while you fiddle with it. The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.

Bush didn't go from explicitly denying this to explicitly admitting it. But he went from implicitly suggesting that his privatization scheme is a pain-free solution to implicitly endorsing a plan for serious benefit cuts. For a politician, that's an admirable difference.

As Somerby wrote, this is truly defining dishonesty down. See CBPP for the full details. Bush has been so egregiously dishonest for his entire presidency that he admits that privatization isn't a free lunch and the pundits fall all over themselves. What a statesman! How courageous! It's pathetic.

Then Kinsley moves into a Cohenesque call for compromise that is astonishingly incoherent:

As this column has argued to the point of stupefaction, Bush's privatization ideas are a mathematical fraud. There is no way that allowing people to manage part of the money they put into the system can produce a surplus to supplement their benefits or cushion the shock of the necessary cuts. But if privatization is truly voluntary, it can't do much harm. And if that is Bush's price for being out front on a real solution to the real problem, the Democrats should let him have it.

Unless they are complete morons -- always a possibility -- the Democrats could end up in the best of all worlds. They know in their hearts that Social Security has got to change in some unpleasant way. Bush, for whatever reason, is willing to take this on and to take most of the heat. And all he wants in return is the opportunity to try something that will alienate people from the Republican Party for generations to come.

Privatization "can't do much harm"? Even though private accounts would be voluntary, they would do a tremendous amount of harm, draining trillions of dollars in transition costs from the Treasury over the next few decades. And where's the "real solution" to the "real problem" that Bush is proposing? The plan he's offered would cover only half of the Social Security shortfall -- and that's before you consider the strain created by private accounts. Last but not least, it's not at all clear that voters will blame the GOP for private accounts. If both sides go along with the deal, the issue will be muddled by the time their effects become clear.

In short, the result is all too typical -- yet another center-left pundit demeaning himself in a desperate attempt to be counter-intuitive. No one wants to be as predictable as Bob Herbert, but why not just focus on getting it right?

How to make a political scientist cry -- Scott Rasmussen's "Hillary Meter"

Here's the New York Post on pollster Scott Rasmussen's effort to put the pseudo-science in political science:

One of the nation's top pollsters has created a new "Hillary Meter" to measure Sen. Clinton's move to the political center for a 2008 White House run - it shows she's made progress but has a long way to go. "Right now, she's too far away from the center to win unless Republicans nominate someone who is even further away," said independent pollster Scott Rasmussen.

...Clinton is now 52 points to the left of the political center -- a bit closer to center than in January, when she was 59 points to the left. Rasmussen said he created the meter because of his "fascination" with Clinton as "the only defining actor" for 2008.

So I went and looked up how the "Hillary meter" is created. Get ready for this nonsense:

Today's Hillary Meter shows that perceptions of the New York Senator have moved four points to the left over the past two weeks.

Forty-seven percent (47%) of Americans now believe New York Senator Hillary Clinton is politically liberal. That's up from 43% two weeks ago, but down from 51% in late January.

Thirty-two percent (32%) of Americans view the former First Lady as a moderate while 8% believe she is politically conservative.

Collectively, these numbers place Senator Clinton a net 56 points to the left of the nation's political center. Two weeks ago, she was 52 points left of center.

The political center is calculated by subtracting the number of liberals from the number of conservatives among the general public (35% conservative, 18% liberal for a net +17). For the Senator, 8% conservative minus 47% liberal equals a net -39. The minus 39 reading for Senator Clinton is 56 points away from the plus 17 reading for the general public.

This is the dumbest methodology I've ever heard of. For one thing, it's well known that many Americans describe themselves as conservatives but are "operationally liberal" when it comes to their specific policy stances. So the net liberal/conservative differential doesn't tell us very much about "the center" or where a presidential candidate should be located on a left-right scale. And it's necessarily a lagging indicator -- people aren't paying close attention to what she's doing right now. Plus he's interpreting minor fluctuations in the polls as relevant that could just be survey error.

Here's a better measure of how liberal Hillary is: her location on a left-right scale compared to other senators in the 108th Congress. This takes into account all the votes she's cast:

It turns out she was the 12th most liberal senator -- almost a standard deviation to the left of the Democratic mean. If she doesn't reposition herself on policy, she'll probably lose in 2008 (though a bad economy could put almost any Democrat over the top). But the first step isn't winning over the American people in Rasmussen's poll; it's winning over elites in the media. Her husband convinced them that he was a different kind of Democrat, and then was able to make a similar case to the voters in 1992, in large part because the media reinforced his message. Can she do it? I doubt it. Perceptions of her are so entrenched that it would take the continued slaughter of liberal sacred cows from now until Election Day.

Richard Cohen fails Social Security 101

How hard is it to understand Social Security? This is Cohen's full time job. Come on!

I'll let Matthew Yglesias do the honors on TPM:

Richard Cohen works up some excellent righteous indignation over the Republican Party's irrational aversion to taxes, but he seems to have a bad case of Washington Post editorial page disease. "George Bush is doing something interesting with Social Security," he writes, "I kind of like the idea of personal investment accounts if funding them does not weaken the overall program or add to the nation's incredible debt."

That's a bit like saying I like the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein if nobody gets killed and it doesn't cost any money. How, exactly, is diverting one third of Social Security's revenues into another program supposed to be done without weakening the program? Well, obviously, it can't. [And Cohen's] idea that "a deal can be made on Social Security" where Bush agrees to raise the FICA cap and Democrats "permit some sort of move toward private accounts" is pure fantasy.

I guess it's possible, as Brad DeLong says, that Cohen wants add-on accounts rather than carveouts, but if so why didn't he write that explicitly?

Update 5/3: James Taranto of Best of the Web notes this passage in Cohen's article:

Whatever the merits of personal investment accounts, they would do nothing to alter the dismal math of Social Security projections. But raising the cap would. Why $90,000? Why not $140,000? Better yet, why not raise it to $140,000 and then raise it to confiscatory levels on obscene payments such as Michael Eisner's $575.6 million back in 1998 . . .

Then Taranto -- try to believe this -- compares Cohen's logic to a suicide bombing:

Raising the cap to $140,000 would amount to an increase in marginal rates of roughly 40% to 45% for taxpayers whose incomes are in the low six figures--a huge tax increase targeted at the most productive Americans. The logic here is similar to that of suicide bombing: It's worth making a big sacrifice for the sake of making the enemy suffer even more. Somehow, though, we doubt most Americans view Michael Eisner as the enemy.

It's our political discourse in a nutshell -- factual incompetence and vitriol all wrapped up together.

George Will, naif

George Will is supposed to be a conservative who is skeptical of government power and bureaucratic mandates. So why is he endorsing this stupid initiative?

Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel. Or it could provide 300,000 new $40,000-a-year teachers without any increase in taxes.

His idea -- call it the 65 Percent Solution -- is politically delicious because it unites parents, taxpayers and teachers while, he hopes, sowing dissension in the ranks of the teachers unions, which he considers the principal institutional impediment to improving primary and secondary education.

The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district's education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.

Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reach the classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts to $13 billion. Only four states (Utah, Tennessee, New York, Maine) spend at least 65 percent of their budgets in classrooms. Fifteen states spend less than 60 percent. The worst jurisdiction -- Washington, D.C., of course -- spends less than 50 percent.

When you write things like the plan "can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel," shouldn't alarm bells go off? George needs a Word macro that warns him when he sounds like he's promoting a pyramid scheme.

The obvious problem is that arbitrary mandates like this are easily evaded and defeated by entrenched interests. Why would we expect that the 65% mandate wouldn't be sucked up by raises for poorly-performing teachers in the Washington, DC public schools, or wasteful IT spending, or bureaucratic spending reclassified under classroom line items? Isn't this sort of thing one of the core insights of the conservative critique of government? Why is Will so blind to it?

The Post realizes there is no mandate -- when will Bush?

The Washington Post discovers that the narrowest presidential reelection since Woodrow Wilson was not, in fact, a mandate:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon -- the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad. In Bush's case, this includes restructuring Social Security and the tax code and installing a group of judges he was unable to seat in his first term. This was the error that nearly sank Bill Clinton's presidency in his first years in office in 1993 and 1994 when he put forth a broad health care plan, and that caused then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republican "Revolution" to stall in 1995 in a confrontation over cutting spending for popular domestic programs.

Indeed -- it's a classic misreading of public opinion of the sort predicted in Politicians Don't Pander. The increasingly ideological folks in our political class win an election, think they can manipulate public opinion, and try to go too far in implementing their ideological goals. Then the public pulls back, and we swing in the other direction. Christopher Wlezien describes something similar called the "thermostat effect" in preferences for spending -- when it goes up, the public's preferences for more spending go down (just as you turn the temperature down on the thermostat when it gets too hot).

The problem is that President Bush hasn't realized that the public isn't with him -- the lesson he's learned from his father and his first term is that bull-headed stubbornness wins political fights. So he's staking his second term on Social Security. But unlike tax cuts, private accounts are not popular, and he doesn't realize that he (like all presidents) generally can't move the numbers on domestic policy initiatives (see Politicians Don't Pander and On Deaf Ears). In addition, his approval ratings are under 50%, the public hates his handling of Social Security, and is slowly turning against the war in Iraq -- more than 50% of the public now thinks it wasn't worth fighting.

Bush may not be part of the "reality-based community," but reality will catch up with him soon enough.

(Related: See my previous posts on mandate claims.)

CBPP on Bush press conference

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a nice summary of the President's deceptive statements during his press conference:

1. Obscuring the fact that those electing private accounts would have to pay back Social Security through reductions in their Social Security benefits...
2. Not explaining that under the option he touted to allow workers to invest their private accounts entirely in Treasury bonds, workers would be guaranteed to lose money...
3. Portraying Treasury bonds in personal accounts as rock-solid, but Treasury bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund as shaky IOUs...
4. Misrepresenting how people who die before retirement fare under Social Security and how they would fare under his proposal...
5. Portraying the private accounts he is proposing are merely what Congress has already provided for itself...

Read the whole thing for full details.

Pat Robertson on judges and Al Qaeda

I'm sure others have linked to this, but I can't let it go by without noting it for the record:

Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists, the Rev. Pat Robertson claimed yesterday. "Over 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings," Robertson said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

"I think we have controlled Al Qaeda," the 700 Club host said, but warned of "erosion at home" and said judges were creating a "tyranny of oligarchy."

Confronted by Stephanopoulos on his claims that an out-of-control liberal judiciary is the worst threat America has faced in 400 years - worse than Nazi Germany, Japan and the Civil War - Robertson didn't back down.

"Yes, I really believe that," he said. "I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together."

Just "a few bearded terrorists" are nothing compared to those crazy judges! Robertson's statement is similar to his suggestion that the US was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which blamed the courts for sinning against God:

"We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government, we've stuck our finger in your eye," said Robertson. "The Supreme Court has insulted you over and over again, Lord. They've taken your Bible away from the schools. They've forbidden little children to pray. They've taken the knowledge of God as best they can, and organizations have come into court to take the knowledge of God out of the public square of America."

This man has no place in our public discourse.

From the up is down file: Bush vs. Myers on military capacity

President Bush at his press conference:

Q: Do you feel, as you are confronting these problems, the number of troops you've left tied up in Iraq is limiting your options to go beyond the diplomatic solutions that you described for North Korea and Iran?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that question. The person to ask that to, the person I ask that to, at least, is to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my top military advisor. I say, do you feel that we've limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq? And the answer is, no, he doesn't feel we're limited. He feels like we've got plenty of capacity.

General Myers' classified report to Congress:

In the report, General Myers wrote, the military faces "moderate" risk in its mission to protect the United States, and he assessed the risk for preventing conflict - including surprise attack - as "moderate, but trending toward significant." Though the general wrote that the military forces "will succeed in any" major combat operation, he added that "they may be unable to meet expectations for speed or precision as detailed in our current plans."

The annual "Chairman's Risk Assessment," which is required by Congress, warned that additional major combat operations "may result in significantly extended campaign timelines, and achieving campaign objectives may result in higher casualties and collateral damage."

That sounds like we're limited to me -- by definition, higher casualties and collateral damage limit the options of policymakers. Sure, we would eventually still win, but that's a stupid definition. The point is that certain actions might not be undertaken that would have been if we weren't so heavily committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, Pentagon flunkies continue to insist that 2+2=5:

Late Monday, a Pentagon official dismissed any serious contradiction between the president and the general. "The two comments are consistent in that no one in the military feels at all limited in the ability to respond to any contingency," the official said. "What the risk assessment discusses is the nature of the response."

Another Pentagon official emphasized that the risk assessment should be understood as a rating of the military's ability to successfully perform its mission based on a set of standards set by the Joint Staff, which is different from the broad statement of military capability given by the president at his news conference.

News I missed: Moore to make Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel

Bad news for those who care about truth in documentary filmmaking:

Michael Moore plans a follow-up to "Fahrenheit 9/11," his hit documentary that assails President Bush over the handling of the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism, according to a Hollywood trade paper.

Moore told Daily Variety that he and Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax boss who produced the film, hope to have "Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2" ready in two to three years.

And why wouldn't he make a sequel? He apparently made $21 million on the first one.

(Related links: The Spinsanity vault on Moore.)

You can always count on Elizabeth Bumiller

Bumillerian cliche:

When Laura Bush wisecracked at the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner on Saturday night that she was a "desperate housewife" married to a president who was always sound asleep by 9 p.m., the popular first lady accomplished two things. She brought down a very tough house, and she humanized her husband, whose sagging poll numbers are no match for her own.

...Whether her cheeky one-liners will shore up her husband as he struggles with Social Security, gas prices and combative Democrats is another question entirely. But her zingers showed how much the White House relies on her to soften her husband's rough edges at critical moments, much as she did with her extensive travels and fund-raising in the 2004 campaign.

Um, those jokes may "humanize" Bush for the press, but they are of no larger consequence. When The Note suggests that your analysis is inane conventional wisdom, you're in trouble:

It's a safe bet to say that, as boffo as First Lady Laura Bush was with her stand up routine at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Dinner, the Gang of 500 won't be able to come up with anything to explain its cosmic political implications better than that it will "soften and humanize" the President. (That is silly analysis on so many levels, we won't even attempt to demolish it.)

The boundaries of elite debate on Social Security

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post on Talking Points Memo taking issue with a Washington Post editorial claiming that "For the past three months Democrats have declined to engage in a debate over Social Security":

Now I'm not sure where Fred Hiatt lives, but here on the planet earth Democrats have very much been engaged in a debate over Social Security. There's a debate on about whether we should have Social Security or whether it should be phased-out and replaced with something radically different. The White House initiated this debate by proposing that we get rid of Social Security, and Democrats have engaged by saying we should keep it. So far, Democrats are winning this debate.On Planet Hiatt there's some other debate taking place about how we should phase Social Security out and what, exactly, we should replace it with. These can be interesting debates...

Nevertheless, this is a whole other debate from the one the country is having right now, which is about whether or not Social Security should be saved. That's the debate Democrats need to be -- and are -- engaged in right now. They have no business engaging in the other debate. Anyone who's genuinely confused as to how a pro-Social Security administration might make the numbers add up can look at any number of plans liberal wonks have put together. But those internecine debates within the Social Security faction are, at the moment, every bit as irrelevant as the internecine debates within the phase out faction. Right now, the debate is about phase out pure and simple. Bush, and the Post, are for it. Democrats are against it.

The issue is whether the debate is about solvency, private accounts, or both. Beltway pundits like Hiatt tend to defer to the establishment on the definition of an issue, and assume that the right answer lies somewhere in between the initial position of the two parties. So when President Bush says we need to have big private accounts and also fix the solvency problem, they say well, we need to create private accounts (just smaller ones) and to fix the solvency problem (though maybe differently than President Bush wants). And when people say Medicare/Medicaid and the general budget are bigger problems, the Post's answer is utterly unconvincing:

Does anyone who's watched the Social Security debate this year imagine that figuring out what to do about health care or Medicare would go just swimmingly?... Sadly, the Social Security debate so far has served chiefly to underline the difficulty, in a political environment dominated by dogma and short-term self-interest.... This is irresponsible, on both sides.

But so, too, would be dropping the subject. If they can't solve this "comparatively minor problem" now, politicians are unlikely to be brave enough, or rash enough, to return to it anytime soon. And we hate to think how they'd face up to a comparatively major challenge.

In short, Social Security is on the agenda so we have to do something about it right now. But Democrats who want to take personal accounts off the table shouldn't worry -- the GOP proved during the health care debate of 1993-1994 that it's easy to withstand elite pressure to do "something" if the other side is getting killed in the polls. The boundaries of elite debate are not set around Fred Hiatt's conference table. And so I think the issue will be phaseout, which means that if Democrats don't lose their nerve, they will win...

Quoted in the Duke student newspaper

From an article in The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, about academic blogging here:

Brendan Nyhan, a second year graduate student in the political science department, has been an avid blogger for years. He has been writing his own blog since October.

Although he has considered how maintaining a blog might affect the possibility of getting tenure in the future, Nyhan said that it does not worry him because he does not write about "outlandish, embarrassing things" or his personal life on the blog.

The best quote, though, is from our esteemed department chair, Mike Munger, about his blog Mungowitz End:

"My blog has nothing to do with my teaching," Munger said. "It is politically incorrect. And I am pretending to be a professional wrestler."

Wall Street Journal mumbo jumbo on progressive indexing

How to pretend that Bush's plan doesn't cut benefits relative to current law in three short paragraphs:

Democrats immediately opposed Mr. Bush's proposal--the brainchild of Democratic financier Robert Pozen--as "big benefit cuts." AARP lobbyist John Rother proved his organization's lack of sincerity by calling it "an unnecessary and unfair benefit cut on the middle class."

Sigh. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other Democrats once acknowledged, current policy increases real, inflation-adjusted benefits over time. That's because benefits are tied to growth in wages, rather than to increases in prices (which rise somewhat more slowly). Though Democrats invoke FDR, this wasn't his idea; guaranteed annual increases were introduced in 1972 as politicians of both parties competed for elderly votes. Reversing this blunder would still protect all seniors from inflation and also go a long way toward addressing Social Security's financing shortfall.

But Mr. Bush is going further and proposing to keep wage-indexing for the bottom 30% of all workers, which means their benefits will actually increase by about 40% by the time they retire. Other workers would see more of their benefits price-indexed on a gradual basis as their income rose.

Art Torres on Arnold: The worst sort of nativism

Art Torres, who chairs the California Democratic Party, is quoted making a truly loathsome statement today in the New York Times that attacks Arnold Schwarzenegger's nationality:

On Friday, they seized upon statements he made praising the so-called Minutemen volunteers in Arizona who patrol the Mexican border for illegal immigrants. President Bush has described the volunteers as vigilantes, but Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would welcome them in California because "our government cannot secure the borders and keep our country protected."

Art Torres, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, accused Mr. Schwarzenegger of exploiting fears about illegal immigration, a historically divisive subject in California, to divert attention from his problems as governor and to appeal to his conservative supporters.

"We don't need an Austrian Minuteman," Mr. Torres said in a reference to Mr. Schwarzenegger's native country.

I'm not a fan of the Minutemen, but that is just out-and-out nativism. Arnold is an American just like Torres. What if he had called Torres a Mexican? There would be hell to pay, and rightly so.