Brendan Nyhan

The simplest explanation for Barack Obama’s problems with his base is the Senate. While many on the left are unhappy with the President’s foreign policy and anti-terrorism policies, the vast majority of liberal discontent has resulted from domestic policy compromises necessitated by Senate rules — in particular, the size of the first stimulus, the death of the public option, and the tax cut deal Obama just reached with Republicans. In each case, Obama’s critics have invoked Green Lantern-style arguments that downplay or ignore the need to get enough votes in the Senate. So why isn’t Obama framing his compromises as necessary under current Senate rules and reiterating his call for reform of the filibuster? (See Jamelle Bouie’s tweet yesterday for a suggestion to liberals along these lines.) Isn’t that the kind of coalition maintenance strategy that Brad DeLong wants?

These days, everyone’s a strategist. The tactics-obsessed media/blog ecosystem has created an army of little David Axelrods who are convinced that they have the (imaginary) solution to President Obama’s problems. The second segment of the pre-election episode of This American Life, for instance, consists entirely of writer Jack Hitt blaming the party’s problems on poor messaging.

The latest example of this attitude comes from liberals who have faulted President Obama for failing to hold his ground on the Bush tax cuts for families making over $250,000 despite public support for his potition. (Under the agreement reached yesterday, all of Bush’s tax cuts will be temporarily extended.) Even the normally sensible Jon Chait gotten worked up about Democrats’ failure on this issue.

The issue is that the President’s position tends to poll well in national surveys of adults. As a result, most liberals think Obama and the Democrats should have the advantage. However, the political reality is more complicated.

First, public opinion in more conservative states is likely to be less favorable to Obama’s original position than national polls. Several of these states are represented by senators whose votes Obama needed and failed to get (e.g., Ben Nelson from Nebraska, Jim Webb from Virginia, Joe Manchin from West Virginia, etc.).

Second, support for the plan may be weaker among likely voters. For instance, the 2010 electorate that senators just observed was divided on the issue between Obama and the GOP (with an additional 15% favoring full repeal):

Thirty-nine percent of voters wanted these tax cuts continued for all Americans, but about as many, 37 percent, wanted them continued only for families with incomes under $250,000 a year. The rest, 15 percent favored letting them expire for all.

Finally, as Princeton’s Larry Bartels noted before the election, supporters of extending the tax cuts for all Americans have more intense preferences than opponents.

Given these factors, it’s not surprising that the party couldn’t get more than 53 votes for Obama’s proposal, especially since so many Senate Democrats are up for re-election in 2012 (including Nelson, Webb, and Manchin).

The other commonly advocated strategy of the mini-Axelrod contingent was to let Bush’s tax cuts expire and hope Republicans cave to public pressure next year, but it was never clear how this plan would succeed. The president is the political figure who is voters held accountable by voters for economic outcomes. As a result, the GOP would still have had the upper hand in any negotiations.

Liberals may find it comforting to blame the tax cut deal on the White House’s tactical failures, but Obama was playing a much weaker hand than most people realize.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

For those who are interested, I’ll be speaking about misperceptions from 12-1 PM tomorrow at the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences at Michigan State University — the talk flyer (PDF) has more details.

The Daily Beast’s Benjamin Sarlin quotes a series of GOP consultants claiming the party’s presidential candidates are “weak”:

Call it the resurgent Republicans’ Achilles Heel. The GOP may have taken the House, closed in on the Senate, and made dramatic gains at the state level. But the party’s 2012 presidential field is weak—and a lot of Republicans know it.

“The Republican field is wide open with no clear frontrunner because they are all, in some respects, flawed,” Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist and Daily Beast contributor, said in an email.

“I think to beat Obama we’re going to have to have a much better field of candidates than are currently there,” Ryan Rhodes, a political consultant and chairman of the Iowa Tea Party Patriots, told The Daily Beast. His counterpart in the early caucus state of Maine didn’t sound any more pumped. “The modern parlance of ‘meh’ pretty much sums up the lineup,” Andrew Ian Dodge, coordinator for the state Tea Party Patriots, said.

Jeff Patch, a Republican consultant in Iowa currently based in DC, described the situation as a “magnification of the problems with the field in 2008”—when each of the major candidates, including eventual winner John McCain, were unpopular with large swaths of the GOP base.

While Sarah Palin is objectively weak due to her exceptionally high negatives, the rest of the field is a perfectly normal mix of current and former members of Congress and governors with various strengths and weaknesses. What neither Sarlin nor the consultants he quotes seem to realize is that almost all presidential challengers seem flawed in the early stages. It’s the process of winning the party’s nomination that gives the candidates stature and unites the party around them.

Consider the example of the 1992 campaign. Even though Bill Clinton would go on unseat George H.W. Bush in the fall campaign, Democrats and the press spent much of 1991 and early 1992 bemoaning the quality of the party’s candidates, including Clinton:

Everett Carll Ladd, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Christian Science Monitor (1/3/92):

Never in modern United States history has a major political party entered a presidential campaign with as weak a slate of candidates as do the Democrats this year.”

Bob Schieffer, CBS Evening News (2/4/92):

John White, the former chairman of the Democratic Party, finally said aloud today what more and more Democrats have been whispering about lately, that while George Bush does look vulnerable, the current crop of Democratic candidates may be too weak to take advantage of it.

Wayne Woodlief, Boston Herald (3/1/92):

Several of the party leaders fretted that the party might nominate a flawed presidential candidate…

“Our only candidate with serious money is Clinton, and he’s got the most problems,” hounded by the draft issue and unproven adultery allegations, Idaho Democratic national committeeman John Greenfield told Newhouse News Service.

And a Southern Democratic leader, who asked not to be named, said, “I truly think Clinton, clean and whole and running, could give Bush hell – and still might.

“But he’s damaged goods. The Republicans will dig into every cesspool in the country to find stuff against him.”

Robert S. Boyd (Miami Herald, 4/8/92):

Pity the poor Democrats. Once again, voters have shown a strong distaste for their leading presidential candidate, Bill Clinton.

The Arkansas governor keeps winning primaries over weak opponents, but he is creating a terrible dilemma for his party.

They seem fated to enter the fall campaign with a standard-bearer who lacks the trust and affection of a majority of Democrats, not to mention the independents vital for victory over President Bush in November. But for the moment they have no realistic alternative.

Despite these concerns, the party came together to support its nominee, Clinton’s flaws came to seem less relevant, and he ended up performing about as well in the general election as we would have expected given how the economy had performed under Bush (see, e.g., Figure 1 here). We should expect the same process to take place for the GOP’s nominee. In the end, whether Republicans take back the White House will depend on whether the economy turns around, not the quality of their candidates (Palin possibly excepted).

Of course, the story will be told differently by the consultants and journalists who promote these narratives. If the economy rebounds and Obama wins, the flaws of the Republican nominee will be blamed for the party’s defeat (as George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and John McCain discovered); if stagnation continues and Obama loses, they will construct elaborate narratives about how Romney/Thune/etc. overcame their flaws to unite the party and lead it to victory.

Update 12/1 5:03 PM: See James Joyner for more.

Update 12/2 1:56 PM: Jonathan Bernstein makes two important related points:

The first is that the quality of the field matters only to each candidate’s chances of winning the nomination. Barack Obama will not face the GOP field in 2012; he’ll face the nominee. It didn’t matter in the fall of 2008 that John Edwards had turned out to be a disaster, and it didn’t matter in fall 2000 that Steve Forbes wasn’t ready for prime time (let along Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes), just as it didn’t matter in 1992 that Paul Tsongas was a lying weasel and the rest of the Democratic field wasn’t much better. By fall, the candidates who mattered were Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

So it does make sense to talk about quality of the field when assessing, say, Rick Perry’s chances of winning the nomination; he has a good chance because there’s no heavyweight running, and some of the other candidates have serious flaws. But that’s a nomination discussion, not a general election discussion.

The second point is that candidate weaknesses in the primary season are not necessarily weaknesses in November, and vice versa. So any pro-choice candidate is incredibly weak in the Republican nomination contest, because pro-life groups will veto such a candidate, even though in the essentially impossible event that such a candidate was nominated, he or she might be strong in November. At a more plausible level, we can talk about Mitt Romney’s weaknesses in the caucuses and primaries, such as his less-than-fully-conservative past and the possibility that some Christian conservatives might be reluctant to vote for him on religious grounds. But if he’s the nominee, no one concerned about abortion on that side would prefer Obama’s fully pro-choice position to Romney’s perhaps insincere, perhaps surface-deep pro-life position. And while it’s vaguely possible that a handful of voters are so anti-LDS that they would prefer that Obama is reelected, it isn’t going to be a large group.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

As I repeatedly pointed out during the Bush years, Republican officials and conservative pundits frequently suggested that Democrats were betraying the country after 9/11. In particular, many suggested that Democrats were intentionally hurting America, endangering US troops, etc. in a series of smears that caused great liberal outrage.

Now that President Obama is in office, however, the parties have switched roles. Republicans have gone from denouncing dissent to engaging in it, prompting a (smaller) number of Democrats and liberals to attack dissent against Obama as potentially treasonous. The latest development is that an influential group of liberal commentators have begun to suggest that Republicans are trying to sabotage the US economy. As with Democratic opponents of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, however, there is no evidence that the opposition party sought to create a negative outcome.

The swami-like mind-reading of putative GOP motives started with Stan Collender, who asserted in August that “Republican policymakers [see] economic hardship as the path to election glory this November.” Paul Krugman promoted the claim in his New York Times column, claiming that “Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House.” Steve Benen added that “We’ve gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.”

When former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson objected (without noting similar claims by the Bush administration), Benen issued a weasel-worded protest, stating that he “obviously can’t read the minds of GOP policymakers, but it seems at least worth talking about whether they’re prioritizing the destruction of a presidency over the needs of the nation.” Would Benen also agree that “it seems at least worth talking about whether” Democrats prioritized the destruction of Bush’s presidency over the needs of the nation? Almost surely not.

A more sensible response came from Greg Sargent, who conceded the impossibility of discerning the GOP’s motives:

First, let’s stipulate that it’s largely fruitless to charge that Republicans are planning to actively sabotage the economy. You can’t prove such a thing…

There’s undeniably an element of partisanship in Republican opposition to Obama’s economic policies, but that’s how politics works. Democrats also reflexively opposed many of President Bush’s proposals, including his initiatives for Iraq, but that doesn’t mean they were sabotaging US foreign policy to ensure his defeat. Moreover, the increasingly routine nature of these accusations hinders open debate. In a democracy, it’s crucial that political leaders can publicly oppose the executive branch without being accused of hurting the country. That principle is no less true today than it was during President Bush’s time in office.

Update 11/29 10:58 AM: I’ve removed a Matthew Yglesias quote from the post above. While I think his claim that “the White House needs to be prepared … for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage” goes too far, it does not include “swami-like mind-reading of putative GOP motives” like Collender, Krugman, and Benen.