Brendan Nyhan

I think Matthew Yglesias overstates the case against political science in this post about the solidarity Minnesota Republicans have shown in standing behind Norm Coleman:

It’s worth remarking a bit on the incredible solidarity the Minnesota GOP is showing with their colleagues’ broader interest in obstructing the inevitable here. Representatives John Kline, Erik Paulsen, and Michele Bachmann, along with Governor Tim Pawlenty, are all seeing their quest to get Minnesota’s fair share of pork and other parochial interests undermined by the fact that their state only has one Senator. Normally, I would expect politicians in that kind of situation to put the interests of themselves and their state ahead of the interests of their political party. In general, the level of party discipline that the Republicans have been able to muster in 2009 (thus far) is really impressive and goes against a lot of conventional wisdom about how the American political system operates. I hope some smart political scientists are doing some thinking about this.

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize political science, but I don’t think this is one of them. It is well-established that party loyalty generally takes precedence over “pork and other parochial interests” in the contemporary political system, particularly when it comes to a zero-sum game like a closely contested Senate race. (See, for instance, my adviser John Aldrich’s book Why Parties?)

Think about the incentives for the four individuals in question. The three House members Yglesias names are all likely to consider running against Franken in six years. Any effort to undermine Coleman now would doom their chances in a GOP primary and might poison their current relationships with party activists. Similarly, any national ambitions that Pawlenty holds would be ended if he turned on Coleman. Given those stakes, the minor bits of shared credit that Minnesota Republicans might obtain for helping Franken bring in pork are an incredibly minor factor.

I think it’s hilarious how much press Newt Gingrich is getting out of his stupid Twitter feed. I can see why it’s great for reporters — they seem cutting-edge (they read Twitter!) and they get a quote without even making a phone call — but can someone remind me why we care again?

One of my pet peeves is the way that political figures often insinuate that their opponents want some bad outcome that might result from their opponents’ policies.

For example, in an email to supporters today, RNC chairman Michael Steele claims that part of the “liberal Democrats’ agenda” is to “destroy the savings of millions of middle-class Americans”:

I don’t believe there is anything patriotic about giving more of your hard-earned money to the government to bankroll the liberal Democrats’ agenda to increase spending to record levels, change the tax code to redistribute the wealth of working families, and destroy the savings of millions of middle-class Americans.

Steele may believe that the effect of Democratic tax policies will be to “destroy the savings of millions of middle-class Americans” but the phrase “Democratic agenda” implies that Democrats want to do so.

This intentional confusion of motive with projected result is something that crops up again and again. Examples include NRSC chairman John Ensign claiming that one of the top legislative priorities of “Big Labor, MoveOn.org and extremist environmental groups” is “weakening our national defense” (one of numerous such GOP attacks on dissent since 9/11) and liberal pundit Eric Alterman claiming President Bush’s opposition to SCHIP expansion constitutes a “preference for allowing poor kids to get sick and die” (see also this post). It’s a corrosive and unfair practice.

In the wake of the US military’s dramatic rescue of an American captain from Somali pirates, pundits and reporters are hyping the political implications of what should be considered a trivial foreign policy event.

For instance, Ezra Klein argues nonsensically that it proves Obama is not like Jimmy Carter:

Over the weekend, Navy Seals equipped with high-powered sniper rifles and night-vision scopes shot three pirates dead and rescued an American hostage. After dark. Using only three bullets. From 100 feet away. On a boat. Which raises the obvious question: Can we finally agree that whatever Barack Obama is, he’s not Jimmy Carter?

Actually, it proves that (a) defeating a handful of pirates who are adrift on a lifeboat on the open sea is easier than, say, a complex hostage rescue operation in a hostile foreign country and (b) the military’s capabilities are much more advanced today than they were in the 1977-1981 period.

TNR’s Michael Crowley also flags the Washington Post’s Michael Shear getting into the act:

It was one of the earliest tests of the new American president — a small military operation off the coast of a Third World nation. But as President Bill Clinton found out in October 1993, even minor failures can have long-lasting consequences.

Clinton’s efforts to land a small contingent of troops in Haiti were rebuffed, for the world to see, by a few hundred gun-toting Haitians. As the USS Harlan County retreated, so did the president’s reputation.

For President Obama, last week’s confrontation with Somali pirates posed similar political risks to a young commander in chief who had yet to prove himself to his generals or his public.

But the result — a dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces — left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad…

The operation pales in scope and complexity to the wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama’s adversaries are unlikely to be mollified by his performance in a four-day hostage drama.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

For the record, we’ve learned very little about Obama’s “ability to direct military actions abroad.” And I certainly wouldn’t expect criticism of Obama’s foreign policy beliefs to be quelled by such a minor victory.

Update 4/13 9:50 PM: Time’s Joe Klein calls Obama “crisp and decisive” — really? How does he know?

Also, via TNR’s Jason Zengerle, here’s AP’s Jennifer Loven going even further than Shear in spinning out elaborate implications based on nearly zero evidence:

The U.S. economy is showing only glimmers of life and two costly wars remain in the balance, but President Barack Obama’s “no drama” handling of the Indian Ocean hostage crisis proved a big win for his administration in its first critical national security test.

…Obama’s handling of the crisis showed a president who was comfortable in relying on the U.S. military, much as his predecessor, George W. Bush, did.

But it also showed a new commander in chief who was willing to use all the tools at his disposal, bringing in federal law enforcement officials to handle the judicial elements of the crisis.

…[The crisis] goes some way toward dispelling the notion that a liberal Democrat with a known distaste for war — Obama campaigned on his consistent opposition to the Iraq invasion — doesn’t have the chops to call on U.S. military power.

However, as Zengerle notes, it’s unclear that anyone outside fringe elements on the right believed Obama would not be “comfortable … relying on the U.S. military”? Who else was going to take out the pirates — the Olympic target shooting team? How is this new information?

Any liberal who has blamed the terrible quality of cable news discourse on its domination by conservatives should be reading Bob Somerby’s most recent series of articles on the vapidity of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, which has become attracted a great deal of attention from liberal elites and media types. The inescapable conclusion of reading Somerby is that the problem with cable news is structural, not ideological. The only way for a pundit to assemble a large enough audience to succeed in prime time is to pander to their audience’s ideological sensibilities and to dumb down their content to the lowest common denominator. The sad outcome of this process is that Maddow — a former Rhodes scholar — is distorting her own previous statements to make Republicans look bad and devoting long periods of airtime to a running joke about Republican “tea-bagging.” (Keith Olbermann’s show operates at a similar level.) I’m sure liberals tell themselves that she’s still better than Hannity, O’Reilly, et al. but that’s a pretty low bar.

Update 4/13 2:21 PM: David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo repeats the “teabag” meme from Maddow. Stay classy!

Update 4/13 11:07 PM: Matthew Yglesias offers some thoughts.

Update 4/14 5:17 PM: Yet more hilarious teabag jokes last night from MSNBC’s David Shuster and Rachel Maddow. It’s a corporate strategy!

I’m sure the Obama White House did not require much persuasion to leak word of the President’s role in approving the successful anti-pirate operation off the coast of Somalia, but I’m going to guess they won’t be so quick to take credit the first time some military operation goes bad. As the administration will soon learn, the president is largely a prisoner of circumstance when it comes to external events like this. The flip side of taking credit for good news is that you’re more likely to be held responsible for bad news.

(To be fair, it makes sense to take credit for positive news given the way voters tend to judge incumbents. The evidence suggests that the president will be blamed by voters for negative events that happen during their time in office so they might as well take credit for the good stuff.)

A few days, I pointed out that the way that conservatives are making allegations against the administration that are rooted in the continuing misperception that President Obama is a Muslim — for instance, the nonsensical allegation that the liberal academic Harold Koh (President Obama’s nominee for State Dept. legal adviser) wants to institute sharia law in this country.

The newest example comes from conservative gadfly Frank Gaffney, who was given airtime by MSNBC to claim that Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (which would constitute a breach of protocol) was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them”:

GAFFNEY: I’m a member of Dick Cheney’s fan club. I think he’s absolutely right that when you yes, have wonderful road shows that encourage all kinds of acclaim from people by telling them what they want to hear — whether it’s European friends that you’re a transnationalist just like they are, or our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them, which is the kind of ground-breaking that was done today.

This is not going to make us safer. It is going to make the world a more dangerous place when you alienate your friends and you embolden your enemies, and that’s what Barack Obama is doing.

DAVID CORN, MOTHER JONES: You’ve got to stick to facts here.

GAFFNEY: I am.

CORN: Where in that speech does he say we’re going to submit to anybody?

GAFFNEY: I think what he is using is code —

CORN: No, no. I’m asking a very specific question.

GAFFNEY: I’m answering your question.

CORN: Ok. Where did he say he’ll submit?

GAFFNEY: When he uses the word “respect,” in the context of a waist-bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, for example, and talks about respectful language, which is code for those who adhere to Sharia that we will submit to Sharia. We will submit to the kind of program –

DAVID SHUSTER, MSNBC: We have to know the code? We all have to know the code to understand how we’re making ourselves more vulnerable?

GAFFNEY: You should. You should know the code. If you don’t (CROSSTALK) —

SHUSTER: But David Corn was asking you for a specific example, and you’re referring to code. You’re referring to code!

GAFFNEY: I’m telling you the code as they receive it in the Taliban headquarters and in al Qaeda’s cave and in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They perceive this as submission.

There is no way that Obama’s apparent mistake becomes the lead story on Drudge if the Muslim misperception does not exist. It just wouldn’t be big news — George W. Bush held hands with Abdullah and no one cared. Why else would anyone think Obama wants to submit to sharia law? He’s a liberal on social issues! It doesn’t even make sense.

In this world, however, Obama’s opponents in the press and the blogosphere are using his misstep to characterize him as somehow foreign or disloyal. The Washington Times, for instance, characterized the bow as “a shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate” in an editorial that said Obama “belittled the power and independence of the United States” — extremely loaded language given many people’s beliefs about Obama. The Times then goes on to darkly suggest that people who believe the President is a Muslim may be right:

Mr. Obama’s bow to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques does not help his image with those who believe he is secretly a Muslim, and why he chose to bow only to the Saudi King and not to any other royals remains unexplained.

The worst part is that the White House (perhaps fearing this sort of response) is denying the story — creating conflict and controversy that could draw in bigger media outlets.

TNR flags a proud moment in the history of the world’s greatest deliberative body — Senator Orrin Hatch quoting at length from a cartoon (Disney’s “Robin Hood”) in a speech against the Obama budget a few weeks ago:

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, a couple weeks ago the Obama administration released an outline of its budget plan for fiscal year 2010…

The document with which most of our colleagues are quite familiar with by now is entitled, “A New Era of Responsibility–Renewing America’s Promise.” While this is a nice title for which I commend the President, it does not sound like the appropriate name for a work of fiction. Because of the impact of the policies outlined in this budget, a more fitting title might be, “How To End America’s Global Leadership and Prosperity Without Really Trying.” Even better, it sounds more like a 1973 Disney animation entitled “Robin Hood.”

In this Oscar-nominated movie about a legendary outlaw, I think a colloquy between Little John and Robin Hood sums it up best. Little John said:

You know somethin’, Robin? I was just wonderin’, are we good guys or bad guys? You know, I mean our robbing the rich to give to the poor.

Robin Hood responded:

Rob? Tsk, tsk, tsk. That’s a naughty word. We never rob. We just sort of borrow a bit from those who can afford it.

…This budget is a masterpiece of contradiction. For example, it promises the largest tax increases known to humankind while promising tax cuts to 95 percent of working families. In reality, the President wants to play Robin Hood by redistributing trillions of dollars from those who already pay the lion’s share of this Nation’s income taxes and give a significant portion of it, through refundable tax credits, to those who now pay no income taxes at all.

Here’s a picture TNR captured of Hatch giving his speech in front of an absurd “Robin Hood” poster his staff apparently put together (whose job is that?):

Sadly, Hatch is hardly the first senator to throw away his dignity in pursuit of pop culture references. Back in 2005, Frank Lautenberg took to the floor with another silly movie poster to compare the GOP’s possible use of the “nuclear option” to “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith”:

Senators love to talk about their chamber as the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Yesterday morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) used the phrase. Yesterday afternoon, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) used it. But it took Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to show why the Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The octogenarian legislator, rising in defense of the filibuster, displayed a larger-than-life poster of Ian McDiarmid playing the evil Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in the just-released film “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.”

“In a far-off universe, in this film, the leader of the Senate breaks the rules to give himself and his supporters more power,” Lautenberg inveighed. “I sincerely hope that it doesn’t mirror actions being contemplated in the Senate of the United States.”

Lautenberg juxtaposed the evil chancellor with another poster, of Jimmy Stewart playing Sen. Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” That film, Lautenberg said, “is a celebration of this Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body. But if the majority leader is successful in ending the filibuster . . . we will move from the world’s greatest deliberative body to a rubber-stamp factory.”

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people might have considered such a display on the Senate floor to be cheap. But in the debate over President Bush’s judicial nominees, which won’t end until Tuesday at the earliest, anything worth saying on either side has long ago been said — repeatedly.

…[I]t was hard to top Lautenberg, whose staff announced, in a media advisory, that the senator “will have visual aids to make his point — great for television!” After Lautenberg, echoing a new MoveOn.org advertising campaign, likened Republican leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) to Palpatine, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), on a visit to the Senate press gallery, was asked what character Democrats represent. “We are the Jedi knights,” he replied instantly. “We have the light source.”

Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson scoffed at these claims, suggesting the Democrats are in fact led by a floppy-eared outcast from Naboo. If Frist is Palpatine and Democrats are Jedi, Stevenson wondered, “would that make Howard Dean Jar Jar Binks?”

It is a question worthy of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Yesterday Ezra Klein made the claim that “if you had run an algorithm using past voting records to predict last night’s roll call [on the budget], you wouldn’t have ended with Nelson and Bayh on their lonesome” voting against the bill. Instead, he argues, they did so in order to obtain favorable press for breaking from their party:

The President’s budget also passed the Senate last night. Zero Republican votes. Two Democratic defectors. Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson. Interestingly, other senators you might associate with their precise position on the ideological spectrum — Lincoln and Landrieu and Pryor and Carper — voted for the budget.

In other words, if you had run an algorithm using past voting records to predict last night’s roll call, you wouldn’t have ended with Nelson and Bayh on their lonesome. But if you had run an algorithm using the amount of press a given Democratic senator has received for being willing to buck the President, you would have.

However, the Optimal Classification algorithm of UCSD’s Keith Poole and UCLA’s Jeff Lewis, which Poole uses to order senators in the 110th Congress (2007-2008) based on their roll call votes, ranks Bayh and Nelson as more conservative than any other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, including Lincoln, Landrieu, Pryor, and Carper. If we assume that all new senators from the GOP are to the right of Bayh and Nelson and all new Democratic senators are to their left, then Lewis and Poole’s estimated ideal points/rankings can perfectly discriminate yes votes from no votes on the budget (with the cutpoint falling between Bayh and the most moderate Senate Republican, who in the 110th was Olympia Snowe). Given the location of the cutpoint, Klein’s statement is false.

Unfortunately, Klein then goes on to engage in mind-reading about Bayh’s motivations:

Some wags are noting that none of Bayh’s much-heralded Caucus voted with him. But that’s precisely why Bayh voted against — because no one else was.

This was, in a strange sense, the safe play. Because the budget only requires 50 votes, their opposition didn’t seriously imperil the President’s budget. If eight more Democrats had signed on, it would have, and there would have been consequences. But the consequences of ineffectual opposition are all positive. Bayh and Nelson have elevated their status as the Democrats willing to imperil the President’s priorities. They’ve assured that the media will say the names “Bayh and Nelson” a lot. They’ve secured themselves a steady stream of requests to appear on news shows and many calls begging for a quote. They have further cemented their status as power brokers in a closely divided Senate and media stars in a conflict-hungry news environment. It’s really a very good day for them.

It’s possible that Bayh is grandstanding in order to attract media coverage (or is engaged in some other sort of insincere politically-motivated behavior). It’s also possible that he sincerely believed in the explanation he provided for his vote. There’s no way to know which is true. Despite his claims to know “precisely why Bayh voted against” the resolution, Klein actually has no idea which of these two explanations is correct.

The speculation about motives continued in a subsequent post suggesting Bayh’s support for an estate tax reduction bill was insincere:

WHY DID EVAN BAYH VOTE FOR KYL-LIEBERMAN?

I understand Evan Bayh’s decision to vote against the budget. In a Senate with 59 Democrats, the opportunity to emerge as the marquee swing vote is undeniably attractive. It brings with it real power over policy and real celebrity in Washington. And there’s even a legitimate argument that Bayh developed in his statement today. He praises the budget for funding “important priorities like affordable health care, energy independence, job creation, and education improvements, rather than tax cuts for the most affluent,” but then says that “under this budget, our national debt skyrockets from $11.1 trillion today to an estimated $17 trillion in 2014…I cannot support such results.”

Fair enough. But then why vote — on the very same day — for the Kyl-Lincoln bill lowering the tax rate on estates over $7 million from 45 percent to 35 percent and reducing charitable giving? That’s $250 billion more debt over 10 years. It’s in direct conflict with Bayh’s statement on the budget. It makes him look insincere.

The obvious answer is that it’s important to wealthy contributors in his state. But Bayh doesn’t face reelection until 2014. No one will remember — much less contribute — based on a vote in 2009. Nor is there a presidential run in his near future. And I simply refuse to believe that Bayh thinks it an important point of principle — more important than debt reduction or health care — that extremely wealthy Americans pay 35 percent, rather than 45 percent, on their estates.

Literally the only compelling justification I can come up with is self-interest: Bayh has a net worth estimated between $3 million and $14 million. That’s the sort of thing that sensitizes you to the downsides of the estate tax real quick. But even that’s not totally satisfying. Calls to Bayh’s office went unreturned. And so I wonder.

Correction: Bayh is up in 2010, not 2014 as I mistakenly thought. It’s not a particularly contested reelection. He has no serious challengers, a massive advantage in fundraising ($10,000,000 on hand, and that was in 2008, before he’d really started fundraising for reelection), full name recognition, solid approval ratings, and is running in a state that Barack Obama won. So I don’t think it’s plausible to argue that supporting Kyl-Lincoln is crucial to his reelection. But he might.

Again, we have nothing other than speculation to support Klein’s suggestion that Bayh’s support for the Kyl-Lieberman bill is insincere. (For what it’s worth, I think there’s a credible argument that supporting Kyl-Lincoln could helpful to a Democrat running for re-election in Indiana, which is still a conservative state — remember, the estate tax polls very poorly even at the national level. And while Klein is correct that Bayh’s seat seems safe, there’s good evidence that members of Congress almost always feel vulnerable to an electoral challenge.)

Update 4/4 7:09 PM: Via email, Klein points me to a later post in which he looks at Bayh’s ranking among Senate Democrats when the Lewis-Poole optimal classification algorithm is run separately on the roll call votes from the 107th, 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses (he says he is using Poole and Rosenthal’s rankings but that is not correct):

Ben Nelson genuinely is a conservative Democrat. The Poole-Rosenthal rankings — which most consider the leading measure of a congressman’s relative ideology — have, for years, ranked Nelson as the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Call him Democrat #1. Evan Bayh, however, has not traditionally been number two. I went back in the rankings through the 107th Congress — which began in 2001 — to compare Bayh and Nelson’s ideological consistency. The numbers on the Y axis represent how conservative of a Democrat each senator was. So #1 would be the most conservative Senate Democrat and #5 the fifth most conservative Senate Democrat and so on. The blue line is Bayh. The red line is Nelson.

To say Bayh lacks Nelson’s steady hand on the wheel is a bit of an understatement. The two really interesting data points, however, are the 109th Congress, which stretched from 2005 to 2007, and the 110th Congress, which ended in January of this year. In the 109th Congress, Bayh’s voting pattern suddenly develops an uncharacteristic liberalism. He becomes the 19th most conservative member, with a record more liberal than, among others, Joe Biden. As context, these were also the years when Bayh was preparing for the presidential run that he eventually aborted.

In the 110th Congress, however, that flash of liberalism gives way to a career-high conservatism: He actually displaces Nelson as the Caucus’s most conservative member. He’s running for reelection in Indiana this year, but this is also the year that Indiana’s tectonic plates shift and the state chooses that Obama guy. So I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand the motivations behind the sharp swings in Bayh’s voting record. But they’re undeniably present, and seem to be keyed to political campaigns. Bayh is much steadier during the 107th and 108th Congresses, when no elections loom.

I agree with all of this, but it doesn’t really justify Klein’s original statement. (Note: Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE algorithm, which is the most well-known scaling procedure in political science, ranks Bayh as the tenth most conservative Senate Democrat in the 106th and 107th Congresses, ninth most conservative in the 108th, fifth most conservative in the 109th, and fourth in the 110th. However, it only allows for linear change by Congress in estimated ideal points and thus can’t handle potential non-linear changes in Bayh’s voting record of the sort that Klein describes above.)

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick debunks the absurd claim that Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and President Obama’s nominee to serve as legal advisor to the State Department, wants to institute Islamic sharia law in this country’s courts — a claim that is based on a single person’s recollection of a talk Koh gave in 2007.

Are we seriously having this debate? As my friend and co-author Jason Reifler pointed out, a Fox News report hyping the claim (via HP) appears to show Koh wearing a gay rights pin:

Let’s just say that most people who are secretly bent on imposing sharia law aren’t also gay rights supporters.

More generally, there’s no way this allegation would be getting traction if so many Americans didn’t think that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Pew just reported that the misperception is holding steady at pre-election levels: 11% of the public and 17% of Republicans say Obama is Muslim and an additional 13% say they don’t know and have “heard different things” (via MJ). As long as this myth persists, Obama’s opponents — like Bill O’Reilly, who questioned tonight whether Obama supports the “global justice jihad” — will continue to push garbage like the Koh allegations that plays on the misperception.