Brendan Nyhan

Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama’s declining political fortunes in 2010:

During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama’s approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has made poor strategic choices or that the President isn’t “connecting” with the American public. Hundreds of hours will be spent constructing elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.

Within two weeks, the narratives about Obama not “connecting” arrived thanks to Scott Brown’s victory in the special election for the open Senate seat in Massachusetts.

It’s now been about a month since I wrote the original post. After tiring of the “not connecting” narrative, the press has now moved on to blaming Obama’s advisors for his political problems. Congressional Democrats have quickly gotten on board, implausibly blaming Rahm Emanuel for not targeting more conservative Senate Republicans on health care.

Obama’s staff certainly has made mistakes, but I doubt they are the principal cause of the administration’s problems. As I’ve pointed out before, good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look like idiots. In other words, staff performance is largely a reflection of the political fundamentals (in particular, the economy), not the cause of a president’s success or failure.

Unfortunately for Obama’s staff, they’re under siege from all sides. The political press needs a dramatic narrative in which the President’s problems are the result of failed political tactics; Democrats need a scapegoat; and Republicans want a scalp (particularly Emanuel’s). If the year doesn’t go well for Obama, it’s likely that someone will be thrown overboard.

PS I predict Mickey Kaus is ahead of the curve on phase three, which will be to blame Obama himself for poor strategic choices.

Update 2/12 9:14 AM: See also Peggy Noonan’s column today, which points in a similar direction as Kaus (i.e. blaming Obama himself).

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Via Tom Lee, I see that American for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist denied endorsing Lenin’s tactics during an exchange with historian Rick Pearlstein on Diane Rehm’s NPR show today (starts at 48:17 in the Real Audio or Windows Media clips):

PEARLSTEIN: Of course Grover Norquist wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. It’s his life’s work.

NORQUIST: No, I don’t. Don’t tell me my position, sir. I’ve written a book on the subject.

PEARLSTEIN: You said that you’re a Leninist and these things are thirty-year projects. These things are on the record.

NORQUIST: We’re not name-calling and I’m a Leninist? Hey, wait a minute, grow up. I’m not a Leninist. I’m an American, thank you. I fought Leninists all my life. And we crushed the Soviet Union, thank you.

PEARLSTEIN: Have you ever said you had Lenin as a hero?

NORQUIST: No.

PEARLSTEIN: He’s lying.

I’m not sure if Norquist ever specifically described Lenin as a hero, but as I pointed out back in 2005, he reportedly had a portrait of Lenin in his house and frequently quoted Lenin’s saying “Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses.”

Similarly, when describing his movement-building plans to the New Yorker, Norquist used language referencing a Communist-style revolution:

[Norquist] talked about how to build a broad coalition. “If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters,” he said. “But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that’s a much bigger section of the population.” To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles over a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote “guns,” in the second he wrote “taxes,” in the third he wrote “faith.” There was a small area where the circles intersected. “With that group, you can take over the country, starting with the airports and the radio stations,” he said. “But with all of the three circles that’s sixty percent of the population, and you can win politically.”

What’s interesting is that Norquist has previously endorsed the comparison. In 2001, a Washington Times column by the Heritage Foundation’s Alvin Felzenberg stated that “Norquist took it as a compliment when Mr. [E.J.] Dionne called him the ‘Lenin’ of the right”:

Their celebratory writings about the advance of 20th century liberalism from Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Johnson are just as ideologically laden as the utterings of Mr. Norquist and his compatriots. Conservative columnists have yet, though, to depict them – or those who put FDR on the dime and JFK on the half-dollar – as liberalism’s “Lenins.” (Mr. Norquist took it as a compliment when Mr. Dionne called him the “Lenin” of the right.)

Update 2/10 10:30 AM: Per the comments below, let me make clear that the point of this post is that Norquist frequently referenced Lenin’s tactics, not that he himself is a Communist (obviously not). Similarly, the New Yorker quote above about “airports and radio stations” was provided as an example of a reference to Communist-style tactics. Again, he wasn’t proposing a Communist revolution. I have updated the language of the post and the title to try to make these points more clear.

John Brennan, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is making a habit of smearing GOP critics of the president’s security decisions.

In a USA Today op-ed today, Brennan writes that “[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda”:

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America’s counterterrorism professionals and America’s system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.

Back in January, Brennan engaged in a similar attack, accusing Republicans who criticized the administration of “playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort.”

Brennan’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the attacks on dissent that Republicans frequently engaged in during the Bush years, particularly John Ashcroft’s infamous testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, is the Obama administration giving in to the same temptation?

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Sarah Palin’s hand notes are the new Rorschach blot of American politics
-My advice? Next time, Palin should write the notes on her shoes like Mike Seaver on Growing Pains
-Inside Edition (!) corrects its misleading reporting on Desiree Jennings case — mainstream media take note!
–The bizarre asymmetry of presidential powers
-Conspiracy-minded pundits suggest the government is investigating Toyota to help US automakers
-You know “That’s how we roll” is no longer cool when David Axelrod is using it on This Week

Understatement of the year on Obama’s proposed health care summit:

[I]t remains unclear whether a single discussion can begin to bridge the political and substantive policy divide with Republicans, who view their united front against the Democratic bills as a key to their political recovery.

I understand the supposed rationale for the summit is to “engage Congressional Republicans in policy negotiations, share the burden of governing and put more scrutiny on Republican initiatives,” as the Times puts it, but let’s be clear — the meeting is an obviously phony PR stunt. The Democrats are locked into the Senate bill plus whatever changes they have to make in a separate reconciliation bill to appease House Democrats. On background, an administration official said “This is not starting over… We are coming with our plan [a merged version of the House and Senate bills].” On the GOP side, the invited Republicans are surely going to use the meeting to promote their own health care agenda, not to try to improve a bill they nearly unanimously oppose. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even said “we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf.”

In short, Obama is raising expectations for genuine bipartisanship, but it’s not going to happen — the odds of important policy changes coming out of the meeting are virtually nil. If House Democrats then go ahead and pass the Senate bill plus a reconciliation package on a party-line vote, the press will again surely note the contrast between Obama’s rhetoric and the realities of legislating in a highly partisan Congress. Is this stunt really worth a delay of more than two weeks?

Update 2/8 9:15 PM: Greg Sargent reports that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is just as dismissive of the exercise as McConnell:

[U]nless the President and Speaker Pelosi are willing to scrap their government take over and hit the reset button, there’s not much to talk about.

Republicans believe the status quo is unacceptable, but so is any health reform package that spends money we don’t have or raises taxes on small businesses and working families in a recession.

Among the right-wing faithful, at least, the myth of the so-called “death panel” persists:

When Andrew Breitbart, the founder of BigGovernment.com, introduced Ms. Palin [to the National Tea Party Convention] by describing her as “the first person to tell us about the death panel,” the crowd cheered.

During a conference call with conservative bloggers yesterday, Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.) accused the Obama administration of conducting “a terrorist protection policy” and engaging in a “jihad to close Guantanamo” (MP3 audio):

[0:21] Let me begin by saying that yesterday’s hearing with the leaders of the intelligence community shows how this Administration think it’s more important to protect the legal rights of terrorists than to protect Americans from terror…

[0:48] What we need in this country is an administration that has a terror-fighting policy, not a terrorist protection policy…

[10:18] They’re on this jihad to close Guantanamo, which is a good campaign promise and is designed to keep ACLU, Media Matters, and the extreme left wing, where Obama still has support in the Democratic Party, happy, but it makes our country less safe…

Bond is the latest in a long line of conservatives who have suggested that President Obama is disloyal using language that draws upon the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Sadly, his comments are unlikely to draw any further notice — it’s apparently no longer considered newsworthy to report that senators are smearing the president’s loyalty to this country.

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Jon Chait shreds the Luntz memo on financial reform as a classic example of conservative postmodernism.
–New economic research on the difficulty of estimating teacher effects on student achievement (PDF).
–More evidence of the insanity of CA public finance under Prop. 13 (PDF).
–Important Boston Globe investigation of Scott Brown’s coat (also repeats the Naomi Wolf myth) — call the Pulitzers!
-Shame — former Rep. J.D. Hayworth joins birther caucus.
-Hatch says using reconciliation for health care would be abuse of power, but it has frequently been used for social policy.

Liberals and Democrats are increasingly adopting the popular post-9/11 tactic of comparing their political opponents to terrorists and murderous regimes. The latest examples come from SEIU president Andy Stern, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

First, via CNSNews.com, Stern referred to Democratic senators who aren’t supportive of labor’s policy priorities as “terrorists”:

Stern criticized Senators Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, who have stalled legislative action with their objections.

“There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we are supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met,” Stern said.

Similarly, Matthews joined Josh Marshall and Frank Rich in comparing Republicans to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia:

What’s going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going on in that party, where they’re going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, if you’re not far right, you’re not right enough.

Finally, Kos engaged in a similar smear in which he likened Republicans to the Taliban, a comparison that is apparently going to be the subject of an entire book:

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world.

The Taliban comparison was coined by former NAACP president Julian Bond in 2001 and quickly came into wide usage, including Senator Tim Johnson, Marshall, Lewis Lapham, Matthews, and Kos. The release of the Kos book will only make things worse.

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his advisers have repeatedly claimed that they don’t listen to DC’s conventional wisdom. But Obama’s decision to propose a freeze of discretionary non-security spending suggests that the White House misunderstands the problem in the same way as most of the rest of Washington.

The problem, as I’ve argued, is that Obama’s political fortunes are closely tied to the economy — a variable over which he has relatively little control. With his first midterm election approaching and the economy in terrible shape, an anti-presidential backlash was a virtual certainty. Obama’s approach to health care or the economy may have exacerbated this backlash — the public tends to move in the opposite direction from public policy (though usually after some lag) — but it’s highly unlikely that Obama’s policies or communication strategies were the primary cause of his declining approval ratings.

The decision to respond to this problem with a partial spending freeze is both bad politics and bad economics. From an economic perspective, Obama faces a serious risk of a long period of slow growth or even a double-dip recession. He has no politically feasible jobs agenda; his proposed tax credit is tiny relative to the scale of the problem. Imposing additional limits at government spending will only make the problem worse.

From a political perspective, Obama’s gesture will have very little effect. The idea seems to be that it will appeal to independents and Republicans who are concerned about the deficit. However, most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will not support Obama no matter what he does. They may say they are concerned about the deficit or government spending, but if those concerns are addressed they are likely to find other reasons to oppose the administration. (In addition, their perceptions are likely to be biased.) Deficits might hurt Obama on the margin, but in most cases I tend to think that they’re a convenient reason to cite for opposing a president you wouldn’t like anyway.

Just to underscore the magnitude of the political and economic problem Obama faces, the White House budget, which was released today, projects “8.9 percent unemployment at the end of 2011, and 7.9 unemployment percent by the end of 2012.” While unemployment isn’t as good a predictor of election outcomes as income growth, these figures underscores the difficult path to re-election that Obama currently faces. He can still win in 2012 — seasonally adjusted unemployment in December 1983 was 8.3% and Reagan went on to beat Mondale in a landslide — but he needs significant growth to do it (regression line excludes the outliers of 1952 and 1968):

Given the historical record, the downside risk of suboptimal economic policy vastly outweighs the symbolic appeal of spending freezes and other short-term deficit measures. Unfortunately for Obama, this is one issue where his administration appears to buy into the conventional wisdom.

Update 2/2 1:30 PM: Matthew Yglesias makes the point more eloquently in a post linking to this one:

Roughly speaking, people got it into their heads over the years that “deficits” are “bad” (which is usually true, but also pretty simplistic) and then the economic situation became very bad, so people have decided that large deficits must be the problem. This is a misunderstanding. An application of a crude, sorta-correct rule of thumb to an unusual situation. It also involves people confusing cause and effect. Steep economic downturns cause large deficits, which is bad. But the deficit is the symptom rather than the cause. Meanwhile, as Brendan Nyhan observes the Obama administration seems eager to pile bad political science on top of the mass public’s bad economics. People are upset, and they say they want a smaller deficit. So Obama’s proposing to give it to them, and seems to have no intention of doing anything about its own forecast of a years-long bleak economic situation.

In political terms, though, the actual performance of the economy in 2012 is going to be much more important to Obama’s re-election than the budget deficit. In particular, by directing its policymaking more at the things that the public thinks are the cause of economic problems rather than the things that economists think are the cause of economic problems, the administration is making is running a huge risk of GOP takeover of the House in 2010. What’s more, they’ve left themselves with almost no margin of error for their own re-election. And for double-irony, the very members of congress who are most endangered by poor short-term economic performance are the ones who are doing the most to urge the administration to adopt a fiscal retrenchment agenda. The faith in vox populi that this reflects (”the public will reward me for doing what they said they wanted me to do, even if it turns out not to work at all”) is sort of touching, but really lacks any basis in the evidence. It’s fascinating to me how few professional political operatives or reporters seem interested in systematic studies of US politics.

See also:
–Seth Masket on pundits misunderstanding Obama’s problems
–John Sides on the overemphasis on process as the problem in the health care debate
–Jon Chait on Peter Wehner ridiculing “structural factors” as the primary reason for Obama’s decline

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]