Brendan Nyhan

Don't trust National Journal rankings

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

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

Blog slowdown

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

Gerson vindicates Suskind and DiIulio?

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

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

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

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

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

Will and Krauthammer are pro-recycling

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

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

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

Karl Rove transformed into economic purist

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

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

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

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

Economic crisis headline of the day

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

Dukes of Moral Hazard

They'll be here all night -- tip your waiters and bartenders!

Exaggerating the effect of gerrymandering

Matthew Yglesias correctly dings Richard Cohen for this passage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "end of newspapers" bubble

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making judicial elections even worse?

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

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

It's an impossible situation. On the one hand, the recusal seems like common sense -- the justice certainly could have personal reasons to rule against the company. But on the other hand, a ruling that judges have to recuse themselves in such cases could have the perverse effect of drawing more money into the system. Attorneys, companies, and individuals might choose to make large contributions as an insurance policy so that they would have a basis to demand recusals by ideologically hostile judges in future court cases.

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

A gridlock model of the Senate stimulus vote

It's interesting to note how precisely the vote to end debate on the economic stimulus legislation corresponds to the gridlock zone model of the political scientist Keith Krehbiel. In the current configuration of power, the model predicts that the 59th most liberal senator -- the so-called filibuster pivot -- determines the fate of any legislation that would move the status quo in a liberal direction. As such, Obama should move policy as far to the left until the filibuster pivot is just barely willing to accept it.

That appears to be exactly what happened. Remember, Democrats have 58 seats pending a final outcome in the Minnesota race and they needed 60 votes. If we use Keith Poole's 110th Senate rank ordering of estimated ideal points and assume new Democrats are to the left of Evan Bayh (the most conservative Democrat) and new Republicans are to the right of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter (the most liberal Republicans in that order), then we find that the pivotal senator is Collins with Snowe to her left and Specter to her right. The final vote corresponds almost precisely to the prediction -- Obama compromised with Snowe, Collins, and Specter and they were the three Republicans who joined 58 Democrats in voting in support of cloture.

The media has berated Obama for failing to attract sufficient Republican support, but the reality is that he didn't need more than a handful of GOP votes in the Senate (nor did he need any in the House). Should he compromise away what he thinks is good policy just to appease Washington insiders? That would be, as he said, "bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake" -- at best a second-order goal and one that can't take priority over policy in a crisis of this magnitude.

Michael Steele's know-nothing populism

Recessions bring out the worst sort of pandering in politicians. Here's a choice excerpt from GOP chairman Michael Steele's weekly radio address opposing the stimulus legislation that is making its way through Congress (ellipsis):

Democrats in Congress want a one-trillion dollar spending bill. You’ve heard about the pork-barrel programs they want to fund... 45 million dollars for ATV trails and removal of fish passage barriers is one that caught my eye. Exactly what is a fish passage barrier and why does it cost 45 million dollars to stimulate the economy with it?

Let's take Steele literally for a moment and discuss the idiocy of this passage. First of all, I'm pretty sure Steele (and most other people) can figure out what a fish passage barrier is just from the name. (If not, he can use what George W. Bush calls "the Google".) Second, how idiotic would it be to oppose a legislative provision because you were too lazy to look up the meaning of a phrase? (I understand that Steele is asking a semi-rhetorical question, but it is -- at a minimum -- a blatant appeal to ignorance.)

Let's also note that fish passage barriers are a real environmental issue. For example, here's an article on the Maryland Department of Natural Resources website that was last updated during Michael Steele's term as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland under Bob Ehrlich:

Fish migration barriers are anything in the stream that significantly interferes with the upstream movement of fish. Unimpeded fish passage is especially important for anadromous fish which live much of their lives in tidal waters but must move into non-tidal rivers and streams to spawn.

...With a fish blockage present and no natural way for a fish to repopulate the isolated stream section, the diversity of the fish community in an area will be reduced and the remaining biological community may be out of natural balance.

If you see a fish barrier you can call Department of Natural Resources at 1-877-620-8DNR and ask for the Fish Passage Program.

In fact, the Ehrlich administration touted the success of its Chesapeake Bay fish passage restoration program. Ron Franks, the Secretary of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, testified before Congress on May 4, 2006 that "The original migratory fish passage restoration goal of 1,357 miles has been surpassed by nearly 500 miles and a new goal of over 2,800 miles has been established." Now, however, the issue is being used to score political points.

Of course, people will have different views about the pros and cons of a fish passage barrier removal program as both environmental policy and economic stimulus. But hopefully we can all agree that this sort of pie-throwing is not a serious contribution to the national debate.

Obama jumps off bipartisanship bandwagon

I've repeatedly mocked Barack Obama's previous suggestions that he would eliminate division and partisanship in Washington, so it was great to see him prioritizing good policy over "bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake" in an interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson yesterday (key quote in bold, my emphasis):

CHARLES GIBSON: And talking of politics, you have said you want bipartisanship in this bill, you want Republican support. You didn't get any in the House, and the leader of the House, the speaker of the House, said, well, yes, we wrote the bill and, yes, we won the election.

Is that kind of an in-your-face trash-talking to the Republicans?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I think what Speaker Pelosi also said was that she wanted to sit down with them and talk to them and, in fact, included some of their ideas in the package. I mean, keep in mind, when I first released the framework for our plan, we were complimented by the Republicans for the fact that about $300 billion of the package was in the form of tax cuts. I was criticized by members of my own party.

Now, that hasn't changed much. The only thing that's changed is the politics of it. And I'm less concerned about bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake. I'm interested in solving the problem for the American people as quickly as possible. And I think that we have an obligation to make sure this money is spent wisely. I want this thing to move through the Senate. I want the House and the Senate bills to be reconciled.

The problem Obama has, however, is that he previously put such a focus on "bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake" that the Washington press is predictably holding him to an impossible standard in which he fails if the stimulus package passes without a substantial number of GOP votes. As Eric Boehlert of Media Matters pointed out, NBC's Chuck Todd even asked if Obama would veto his own stimulus bill "if it didn't have Republican support."

The pattern here is disturbingly familiar. The Washington press focuses on political tactics rather than substance because tactics are both more entertaining and easier to cover. In this case, rather than questioning Obama about how to make the stimulus bill more effective, they are berating him for failing to get enough Republican support -- a trivial issue given the severity of the economic crisis.

Post-Super Bowl education policy

How football-crazy is Pittsburgh? I mocked Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl for holding a news conference to pretend to change his name to "Luke Steelerstahl" before the AFC championship game between the Ravens and the Steelers, but that's nothing compared to the fact that the local schools opened two hours late yesterday to try to reduce expected high rates of absenteeism among students and employees. Who needs snow days anyway?

Obama, like Bush, can't "change" Washington

It was amusing to see Today's Matt Lauer suggesting on Thursday that Barack Obama had failed to achieve change in Washington (nine days into his presidency!) because the House GOP voted against the stimulus bill:

You say it's the third inning, but let me say that sentence over again. The bill passes the House, but not one Republican votes yes. If you were one of those two million people standing out in the cold on the Mall last Tuesday listening to the president's inaugural address, or one of the tens of millions watching it at home, how could you not be waking up this morning thinking there's no change, this is Washington as usual?

That said, however, I'm sympathetic to the idea that Obama's claims to transcend partisanship are as hollow and unlikely to succeed as those of George W. Bush.

Ironically, the response to Lauer's question from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs echoed the White House's "changing the tone" rhetoric almost precisely:

Mr. GIBBS: Well, look, Matt, the president knows that it's going to take longer than a few days to change the way Washington works. You saw pictures of the president going up to Capitol Hill, and his hand will continue to be extended to any and all people that want to work with him. I'll tell you, what I worry about most of all are the people that have heard over the past few days, that work for Boeing or Home Depot or Microsoft or Starbucks, that they're going to be losing their job this year. That's what the president thinks about every day when he works with Democrats and Republicans to get a plan that will help put them back to work. That's what he'll continue to do today.

Here's White House spokesman Ari Fleischer doing the same rap in a January 2001 briefing:

QUESTION: Let me ask it another way then. Is the president-elect surprised that the Ashcroft nomination has created such a stir, or whatever label you want to put on it?

FLEISCHER: I'd be hard pressed to say that he's surprised. I think he understands how Washington can get sometimes. It's one of the reasons he wants to change the tone in Washington.

QUESTION: Wouldn't you say that it's good for you?

(CROSSTALK)

FLEISCHER: I'm sorry?

QUESTION: Wouldn't you say that it's good for you, energizing your conservative base? And it allows some people to deplore the partisanship.

FLEISCHER: No. I think one of the things that President-elect Bush is going to do when he comes here and is sworn in is, not look at things with the usual prism that Washington looks at things--is it good for me, is it good for the other guys, will this help gin up the base, will this help somebody raise money.

He said that one of the lessons of this election, the close election that we've had, is that people need to put the national interest ahead of the partisan interest. And he's going to endeavor to contribute to that in the things he does and says, and we hope that others will follow.

And I think we also--also, it's going to take time. He can't just come here overnight and change Washington. That is never going to happen. But he will endeavor to do so over the course of time.

Like Bush, Obama's efforts to "change the way Washington works" will fail. Indeed, as I wrote back in March 2007, Obama's rhetoric is not only unrealistic but potentially offensive to democratic norms:

Instead, most of Obama's appeal comes down to his call for a new politics that is less cynical and polarized -- a vain hope. Bill Clinton and many other politicians have called for such a change, and none have succeeded. The underlying structural forces that promote polarization are unlikely to relent. And more importantly, polarization is a two-sided phenomenon. Calling for depolarization once you are president is, in practice, a call for the opposition to go along with your initiatives -- as in President Bush's call to "change the tone" (see All the President's Spin for more). It's an absurd promise that no candidate can deliver on (though Bush briefly claimed victory at "changing the tone" when his sky-high post-9/11 approval ratings silenced the Democratic opposition).

Let's hope Obama doesn't use this rhetoric as a cudgel against the opposition like Bush did after 9/11.

The unwelcome advice of Rove and Lindsey

Can you believe Karl Rove and Lawrence Lindsey are offering advice on how to run the White House? Remember, these guys were leaders of the Mayberry Machiavellis whose attempts to "create [their] own reality" led to an almost unparalleled string of policy failures. What's next -- memos from Donald Rumsfeld on improving civilian-military relations in the Defense Department?

Metaphysical Super Bowl questions

Question: Why does the lede of an AP story state that "Jennifer Hudson returned to the spotlight Sunday with a flawless performance of the national anthem" when the very same story reports that she lip-synced? Under those circumstances, how could it not be a "flawless performance"?