Brendan Nyhan

This is ridiculous:

I guess I should say that Condi Rice’s race and gender are not the most important things about her career and abilities. But I’m still amazed at how little credit this president gets for promoting a black woman to such a position, and, more importantly, by his obvious respect and admiration for her. His management style is clearly post-racial, and his comfort with female peers is impressive. You know, Bill Clinton was celebrated for his progressiveness, and ease with African-Americans. But it’s inconceivable that he would have given so much power and authority to a black female peer. Why does Bush get no respect on this score? I guess it reveals that much of the left’s diversity mania is about the upholding of a certain political ideology, rather than ethnic or gender variety itself. Depressing.

How could Sullivan possibly know that Clinton wouldn’t give authority to a black female peer?

Al Hunt claims (subscription required) that the vast amounts of money raised by the parties from small donors in 2004 proves that critics of McCain-Feingold were wrong. And to a certain extent they were – the parties did raise a lot more from small donors than anyone anticipated. But it’s likely that the parties would have raised a lot of money online no matter what – pretty much every major player in politics did.

More importantly, Hunt fails to grasp the problem with the way soft money restrictions pushed donors to form parallel quasi-parties like The Media Fund and America Coming Together. He thinks we get a free lunch – they organize the grassroots, and parties supposedly don’t engage in “influence peddling” driven by the quest for big donations. But by making the parties unofficially beholden to and dependent on these new quasi-parties, McCain-Feingold has actually given the special interests much greater leverage over elected officials, particularly with the side that does not control the White House. Hunt has no idea what he’s helped unleash.

1. Social Security’s long-term fiscal imbalance is relatively small and can be addressed through a series of relatively modest changes in rules, eligibility, etc.

2. Private accounts actually make the Social Security imbalance worse, not better, in the short to medium term. Transition costs are estimated at $1-2 trillion. In addition, there are many difficult issues that would have to be resolved to create a well-designed private accounts system. The upshot is that private accounts are an attempt to change the fundamental nature of Social Security (for better or worse), while also addressing financing shortfalls through borrowing and rules changes. They are not a direct solution to the imbalance except in the long term.

3. The massive long-term shortfall in Medicare financing is a much, much bigger problem than Social Security. No one has any good answers for dealing with this. If you have any, please call Congress.

That is all.

Here’s a classic example of David Broder’s fetish for bipartisan cooperation. He frequently decries irresponsible deficit spending at the federal level, but the Era of Good Feelings in California has him swooning for Arnold:

A year after he took office, following the voters’ recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger is riding high in California. A recent Los Angeles Times poll put his job approval rating at 66 percent, and his efforts to break through the political paralysis that had contributed to a serious fiscal crisis in state government have won commendation across the spectrum.

But what about this serious fiscal crisis? Oh yes, the way Schwarzanegger has dealt with it is by putting off California’s fiscal problems for the future, primarily by unloading them on future generations through new debt offerings. And the state still has a major structural deficit brought on by its insane governance procedures. It’s easy to cooperate when you avoid tough decisions!

Broder finally acknowledges the problem in a single sentence: “[D]espite an improving economy, revenue is still expected to fall short of expenditures by an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion next year in a $103 billion budget.” But then it’s back to happy days: “The ‘changed climate’ that President Bush promised but did not achieve in his first term in Washington is on display in Sacramento.”

There’s no question that Schwarzanegger has broken the strangehold Democratic interest groups have held on Sacramento, and that’s a good thing. But the jury is still out on the merits of his policies, particularly with regard to that nagging fiscal crisis. The fact that he’s working with Democrats is not proof of anything in and of itself.

In a New York Times story on the GOP leadership rule change, Tom DeLay tells us that

Mr. DeLay said he did not expect to be indicted, but added, “This has nothing to do with whether I was going to be or not going to be.”

Wow. There is just no way that the administration is going to be able to get rid of the employer tax deduction for health insurance. See Jonathan Rauch on Demosclerosis — the interest groups will eat you alive when you start taking on sacred cows like that. (Hat tip: Atrios.)

After a discussion of the ways the bureaucracy tries to subvert elected officials, the Washington Times commentary page editor offers another suggestion that George W. Bush’s political opponents are traitors:

This is the trifecta that President Bush has chosen to compete in: Fight our foreign enemies, stand by the convictions he expressed in the election and appoint smart people who are loyal to him in the agencies. This means war to the political death all winter, spring and summer in Washington. If George W. Bush gets his nominees through and is still standing tall in August, we may be in for a historic presidency. But every yard gained on Pennsylvania Avenue will have been taken under heavy fire — from all five columns.

Headline in the Duke Chronicle yesterday: Hunger to be discussed at banquet…

Ron Brownstein, all-around political swami, is the latest analyst on the mandate beat. Once again, Bush’s victory was narrow, not sweeping:

Measured as a share of the popular vote, Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That’s the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.

The only previous incumbent who won a second term nearly so narrowly was Democrat Woodrow Wilson: In 1916, he beat Republican Charles E. Hughes by 3.1 percentage points. Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.

In that 1916 election, Wilson won only 277 out of 531 electoral college votes. That makes Wilson the only reelected president in the past century who won with fewer electoral college votes than Bush’s 286.

Measured another way, Bush won 53% of the 538 electoral college votes available this year. Of all the chief executives reelected since the 12th Amendment separated the vote for president and vice president — a group that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson in 1804 — only Wilson (at 52%) won a smaller share of the available electoral college votes. In the end, for all his gains, Bush carried just two states that he lost last time.

Michael Tomasky plays the upstate card in a Washington Post article on the future of the Democratic Party:

Michael Tomasky, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine and the author of a book on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, said people should not assume she cannot win moderate voters the same way her husband did. In 2000, he noted, she defied stereotypes and ran nearly even with her opponent in Upstate New York, which normally votes overwhelmingly Republican.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Obnoxiously quoting myself:

First of all, her 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

More data: Bill Clinton won upstate New York 50%-37% in 1996. Don’t believe the hype!