Brendan Nyhan

Specter's switch: Not a game-changer

Can we put a moratorium on the phrase "filibuster-proof majority"? Yes, Arlen Specter's defection means that Democrats will hold sixty seats in the Senate once Al Franken is eventually seated. But the phrase "filibuster-proof" falsely implies that the party will have no problem passing its agenda through the Senate. In reality, as more sophisticated pundits have pointed out, getting sixty votes will still be very difficult on many issues.

Before Specter's defection, Democrats needed support from all of their caucus, including moderates like Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh, plus two Republican moderates like Specte, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins (with the required number of GOP votes increasing in the number of Democratic defections). That calculus is only slightly more forgiving today. While political science research does show that party switchers tend to substantially alter their voting behavior -- an effect that should be even more pronounced given that Specter faces a Democratic primary next year -- the net effect of Specter's switch is likely to be, say, a .4 vote boost on cloture votes for Democratic legislation in the Senate (i.e. Specter votes with the Democrats 75% of the time instead of 35% or whatever). The optics of the switch may be symbolically important, but contrary to Ron Wyden's claim, the legislative consequences are not likely to be "game-changing."

Obama on the torture counterfactual

Advocates of "enhanced interrogation techniques" tend to cite evidence showing that a detainee provided information after being tortured as if proves their case. But as I noted a few days ago, the key question in the debate over the efficacy of torture (which I abhor under any circumstances) is whether detainees provide more useful intelligence while being tortured than they would have under conventional interrogation. Few people seem to understand this point.

As Kevin Drum points out, President Obama made a similar argument in his press conference last night (emphasis mine):

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. You've said in the past that waterboarding in your opinion is torture. And torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?

MR. OBAMA: What I've said -- and I will repeat -- is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion; that's the opinion of many who've examined the topic. And that's why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced that it was the right thing to do -- not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways -- in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

It's good to see Obama standing up for the efficacy of conventional interrogation, which is underrated by pundits and apparatchiks who have seen too many episodes of 24.

The torture counterfactual

I'm repulsed that we're even discussing whether it's acceptable to waterboard someone 183 times, but the key point in the debate over the effectiveness of torture (as one of Diane Rehm's guests pointed out Thursday) is whether the "enhanced interrogation techniques" generate new intelligence that would not have been obtained using conventional techniques.

It drives me nuts to hear people claim that we know these techniques work because suspected terrorist X gave us some piece of information after being subjected to torture. Even if those claims were true (many are not), they do not prove that torture works. If the same suspected terrorists would have provided the same information under conventional interrogation in the same amount of time (as former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan claims), then there is no evidence that torture is more effective. However, we do not observe that counterfactual scenario (a problem known as "the fundamental problem of causal inference") and are thus forced to speculate about what would have happened.

(The debate on this point will almost surely be inconclusive. To evaluate this question scientifically, one would have to unethically randomize prisoners into torture and conventional interrogation conditions. In the absence of such data, both sides are likely to rely on their ideological preconceptions to interpret the anecdotal accounts that are released to the public.)

Reconciliation and legislative sustainability

Max Baucus makes a misleading claim about the effect of the use of the reconciliation process on the sustainability of health care reform in today's New York Times:

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said Friday that he would prefer not to pursue health legislation through the reconciliation process.

“I think it gets in the way,” Mr. Baucus said, explaining that his goal was to produce a health care bill that could “get significantly more than 60 votes.”

“If we jam something down somebody’s throat, it’s not sustainable,” he said.

In fact, however, the reality is that the status quo is privileged in the American system of government. While it would certainly be possible to overturn a health care bill passed under reconciliation, doing so would require a significant shift in the configuration of the House, Senate, and the presidency. Assuming that reconciliation wasn't used by a future Republican majority in the Senate to overturn the health care plan, you would need a Republican House majority, a Senate in which the 41st most liberal senator (Claire McCaskill in the 110th Congress) prefered overturning the plan to the status quo, and the election of a Republican president who would not veto the bill. The Senate condition would be somewhat more likely to occur with a more liberal bill, which is the likely result of the use of reconciliation, but it's hardly a trivial condition.

(To specify this more precisely, you could use a gridlock zone model of the sort developed by Keith Krehbiel, David Brady, and Craig Volden, but assume that the pivotal voters on the bill under reconciliation would be the median members of the House and Senate rather than the filibuster pivot in the Senate. You would then compare the configurations necessary for reversing the bill to the case in which the filibuster pivot in the Senate is the pivotal voter.)

Update 4/27 7:59 AM: Corrected to note the obvious necessity of a Republican House majority to overturning any Democratic health care bill.

Most mundane political tweets ever

Matt Bai chronicles the agonizingly banal Twitter output of our political elites:

Some politicians use Twitter — or, in many cases, have their staff members use it — as a vehicle for their daily message or as a kind of running travelogue. (“Back from Belgium,” Representative Darrell Issa of California tweeted last month. “They make quite a waffle.”) Other politicians have decided that Twitter is a way for us to become immersed in the mundane details of their private lives. The clear leader in this field is Claire McCaskill, Missouri’s junior senator, who took up Twitter just before the inauguration. “I get old style crunchy taco, and a chicken burrito supreme & Diet Coke at Taco Bell,” McCaskill recently tweeted. “Miss those tostados.” Then: “Ok, ok, brain freeze. I know you can only get Diet Pepsi at Taco Bell.”

Issa's is my favorite. Here are some predictions for Issa tweets after future foreign trips:
-"Back from Sweden. They make quite a meatball."
-"Back from England. They make quite a muffin."

Thank goodness technology has made the sharing of these insights possible.

Politifact wins a Pulitzer

As a former fact-checker, I don't always agree with Politifact, but it's a great sign for journalism that they won a Pulitzer last week. Reporters need incentives to go beyond "he said"/"she said" reporting and counter political spin. The Pulitzer committee's decision is a step in the right direction.

Leave no pollster behind: Mark Penn edition

Is it possible that Mark Penn, one of the leading pollsters in America, is a quantitative illiterate?

Penn's recent Wall Street Journal op-ed interpreted a Technorati poll of bloggers in an obviously absurd manner, claiming that "It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year." In fact, the poll found that those bloggers with more than 100,000 unique visitors made an average of $75,000, but the median income in this group was only $22,000.

Here's Matthew Yglesias summarizing the problems with Penn's reasoning:

There are all kinds of problems with the statistical inference Mark Penn reaches in this article but just take a gander at this part of Penn’s response to his critics:

The question of how much traffic it takes to make a living also comes from the Technorati report. We say it takes “about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year” and Technorati states those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors the average income is $75,000.

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get a passing grade on an AP math test making this kind of mistake, much less pass yourself off as a data-crunching expert. Technorati says that the average income of professionals bloggers who have over 100,000 unique visitors per month is $75,000. Penn glosses this as saying that “about 100,000 unique visitors” is enough to earn $75,000 which isn’t even close to being the same thing. The mean earnings of high-traffic bloggers are pretty decent. The median earnings are almost certainly lower. And the earnings of a blogger operating at the low-end of what counts as high-traffic will be lower still.

What's astonishing is that Penn can charge clients like Hillary Clinton millions of dollars for his insights into polling data (talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations). At some point, the Moneyball-ization of politics will hopefully run people like this out of the profession.

PS This error is so embarrassing/revealing that it would actually be better for Penn if people think he was being intentionally dishonest.

Chait on Rove's hypocritical Obama criticism

TNR's Jon Chait offers the definitive take on the bizarre hypocrisy of Karl Rove's Obama punditry:

The depiction of Barack Obama that has emerged from some quarters of the American right is that of a Bush-like figure. He is irresponsibly running up deficits and covering them up with budgetary gimmickry. Under the guise of healing rhetoric, he ruthlessly pressures fellow partisans in Congress to toe the line. He is "filling White House ranks with former lobbyists," and his administration is devolving into general incompetence. And he has given unprecedented, Rove-like power to his political Svengali, David Axelrod. Oddly enough, the author of all these particular criticisms is Rove himself.

...Rove, as one would imagine, goes about his task in the bluntest manner, elevating shamelessness to a kind of performance art. He clucks disapprovingly that "senior White House staff meet for two hours each Wednesday evening to digest their latest polling and focus-group research." The man who described the liberal reaction to September 11 as "offer therapy and understanding for our attackers" now sadly says that Obama "routinely ascribes to others' views they don't espouse." There's nothing unusual about political hacks becoming hack pundits, but you didn't find, say, James Carville on CNN accusing George W. Bush of sexually exploiting White House interns.

The use of reconciliation 1980-2008

If you follow Congressional politics, you may have heard the beginnings of a debate among the parties about the potential use of the reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes, as a way for Democrats to avoid a Republican filibuster of a health care bill in the Senate. This is one of those annoying topics on which the parties (and their supporters) switch positions each time control of the majority changes. In this case, Democrats who previously opposed the use of reconciliation for policy changes now support it and vice versa for Republicans.

It's a debate that's remarkably short on context -- the politicians obviously don't want to explain the issue in sufficient detail to expose their own hypocrisy and reporters often have a limited understanding of Congressional procedure. That's why I was happy to see that the political scientists Thomas Mann (Brookings) and Norm Ornstein (AEI) have written a TNR Online article with Molly Reynolds (a Brookings researcher) on the history of reconciliation. Their conclusion? Reconciliation has been exploited by both sides to make policy changes without facing a filibuster:

What is the precedent for using reconciliation to enact major policy changes? Much more extensive than the architects of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 had in mind-or than Senate Republicans are willing to admit these days. Reconciliation was designed as a narrow procedure to bring revenue and direct spending under existing laws into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. It was used initially to cut the budget deficit by increasing revenues or decreasing spending but in more recent years its primary purpose has been to reduce taxes. Twenty-two reconciliation bills were passed between 1980 and 2008, although three (written by Republican majorities in Congress) were vetoed by President Clinton and never became law.

Whether reducing or increasing deficits, many of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy. Health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, the state Children's Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform were all enacted under reconciliation procedures. Health reform 2009 style would be the most ambitious use of reconciliation but it fits a pattern used over three decades by both parties to avoid the strictures of Senate filibusters.

They also provide a handy table of all twenty-two bills for historical reference:

Budget Reconciliation Bills Signed Into Law, 1980-2008

Bill	Major Purposes	Change in Revenue	Change in Outlays	Net Effect on Deficit
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980	First use of reconciliation process.	$29.2 billion	-$50.38 billion	-$79.58 billion; 1981-1985
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981	Made significant cuts to discretionary programs, including welfare and food stamps.		-$130 billion	-$130 billion; 1981-1984
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1982	Reauthorized and made changes to food stamp program. Made changes to federal employee pay formula and to the farm support program.		-$13.3 billion	-$13.3 billion; 1983-1985
Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA)	Rescinded some provisions of the previous year's Kemp-Roth tax cuts.	$98.3 billion	-$17.5 billion	-$115.8 billion; 1983-1985
Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1983	Made changes to federal employee pay and retirement formulas.		-$8.2 billion	-$8.2 billion; 1984-1987
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985	Mandated an insurance program giving some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after leaving employment (COBRA) and amended the Internal Revenue Code to deny income tax deductions to employers for contributions to a group health plan unless such plan meets certain continuing coverage requirements.	$9 billion	-$15.9 billion	-$24.9 billion; 1986-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986	Ordered the sale of Conrail. Made minor changes to Medicare hospital provisions.	$10.5 billion	-$6.5 billion	-$17.0 billion; 1987-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987	Created federal standards for nursing homes under Medicare and expanded Medicaid eligibility	$23.2 billion	-$16.4 billion	-$39.6 billion; 1988-1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989	Made approximately $10 billion in spending cuts	$15.4 billion	-$23.77 billion	-$39.2 billion; 1990-1992
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990	Established Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) rules for the first time and implemented a range of tax increases	$137 billion	-$184 billion	-$236 billion; 1991-1995
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993	Created two new personal income tax rates and a new tax rate for corporations. The cap on Medicare taxes was repealed, and gas taxes were raised. The taxable portion of Social Security benefits was increased. The phase-out of the personal exemption and limit on itemized deductions were permanently extended, and the earned income tax credit was expanded.	$250.1 billion	-$254.7 billion	-$504.8 billion; 1994-1998
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)	Clinton's welfare reform bill	$1.9 billion	-$52.2 billion	-$54.1 billion; 1997-2002
Balanced Budget Act of 1997	Contained first portion of Clinton's plan to balance the federal budget by FY 2002. Created the Children's Health Insurance Program. Made changes to Medicare hospital payment policy.	$8.6 billion	-$118.6 billion	-$127.2 billion; 1998-2002
Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997	Clinton's tax cut package	-$88.9 billion	$11.5 billion	$100.4 billion; 1997-2002
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001	First Bush 43 tax cuts	-$512 billion	$40 billion	$552 billion; 2001-2006
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003	Second Bush 43 tax cuts	-$314 billion	$29.5 billion	$342.9 billion; 2003-2008
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005	Reduced Medicare and Medicaid spending, changed student loan formulas, and reauthorized the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.	N/A	-$39 billion	-$39 billion; 2006-2010
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005	Extended several of the earlier Bush tax cuts, including the reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends and the alternative minimum tax (AMT) tax reduction.	-$70.0 billion	N/A	$70.0 billion; 2006-2010
College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007	$20 billion student aid reform package. Included grant increases, loan rate reductions, and created public service loan forgiveness program.	N/A	-$752 million	-$752 million; 2007-2012

Offensive sign wars

Matthew Yglesias highlights the presence of offensive signs at "tea party" protests yesterday and notes that "the TV coverage I saw of the parties didn’t make any mention of the presence of so many signs with a clear racial subtext" (see also Dana Milbank's report on the DC protest). I have to say I'm bored with offensive sign blogging, which also shows up on conservative blogs after anti-war protests. The problem is that virtually any mass political protest or demonstration attracts crazy people with hateful and offensive signs. A presidential campaign would generally confiscate the worst signs, but decentralized protests (like the "tea parties," anti-war protests, etc.) usually do not, so where do you draw the line as to when the signs are newsworthy?

Party before pork for Minnesota GOP

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.

Newt Gingrich's Twitter media domination

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?

Steele: Democrats want to destroy savings

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.

The arrrrbitrary nature of pirate politics

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?

Maddow on MSNBC: Still cable news

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!

The double-edged pirate sword

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.)

The othering of Barack Obama

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.

Orrin Hatch quotes from Disney's Robin Hood

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.

Klein is wrong on Bayh and Nelson

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.)

The bizarre Koh sharia myth

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.

Fighting the mythical global currency

Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is hyping the myth that the Obama administration is planning to replace the dollar with a global currency. In fact, the proposal under discussion (which the Obama administration does not support) would create a new global reserve currency -- it would not replace the dollar as the legal currency here in the US.

Bachmann has even proposed a constitutional amendment that would prevent the president from entering "into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States" As TPM DC's Eric Kleefeld points out, it has a disturbing number of cosponsors (currently 32). Are these members -- who are all Republicans -- aware that no one is proposing creating a new currency that would serve as legal tender in the United States? I suspected that they might be pandering to ill-informed constituents but education, income, etc. are not closely related to cosponsorship -- the only consistent predictor is the conservatism of the legislator's previous voting record.

Bachmann's straw man legislation inspired me to check out another well-known myth -- the fictitious "NAFTA superhighway" that was hyped by Ron Paul and talk radio hosts. And in fact former Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) introduced a resolution in 2007 expressing the sense of Congress that "the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada." That bill attracted 52 cosponsors, including eight Democrats. With the exception of Marty Kaptur, a free trade opponent from Ohio, all of the Democrats -- including Kirsten Gillibrand, the newly appointed senator from New York (!) -- represented heavily rural districts that John Kerry lost in 2004. Supporters of the resolution tended to be more conservative and anti-trade.

When we combine the cosponsorship lists on these bills, we get what I call the Congressional myth caucus -- the fourteen members who sponsored or cosponsored both Bachmann's amendment and Goode's resolution:

Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)
Spencer Bachus (R-AL)
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)
Paul Broun (R-GA)
Mary Fallin (R-OK)
Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Phil Gingrey (R-GA)
Darrell Issa (R-CA)
Walter Jones (R-NC)
Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Zach Wamp (R-TN)

It's a brilliant approach to politics -- you scare people with a phony rumor, take a stand against a position no one supports, and then claim credit for its defeat.

Update 5/6 12:12 PM: The list above has been corrected to fix a coding error.